SpaceX advances starship program with a launch and a catch

SpaceX pulled off a feat of technical wizardry Sunday, not only flying a 233-foot rocket booster back to its launch site, but also catching it out of the air with two giant mechanical arms.

It occurred during the fifth test flight of the Starship rocket and was a huge step forward for the ambitions of SpaceX and its founder, Elon Musk, which include one day transporting people to Mars.

In the more immediate future, NASA is paying SpaceX $4 billion to use Starship to take astronauts to the surface of the moon during two upcoming missions in its Artemis program.

Musk’s company, in addition to having built and flown the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, has also demonstrated a key technology needed to make the vehicle completely reusable and able to fly again and again quickly, more like a jetliner than a rocket.

Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, congratulated SpaceX on Sunday’s flight in a post on the social platform X.

“As we prepare to go back to the Moon under Artemis, continued testing will prepare us for the bold missions that lie ahead — including to the South Pole region of the moon and then on to Mars,” he said.

At 8:25 a.m. Eastern time, the rocket, nearly 400 feet tall, lifted off from the SpaceX launch site near Brownsville, Texas. The upper-stage Starship vehicle, stacked on top of the first stage, known as the Super Heavy booster, will be capable of carrying more than 100 metric tons to orbit.

After the booster successfully pushed Starship upward through the densest part of the atmosphere, it dropped away as Starship continued to head toward space.

The booster then ignited a few of its 33 engines to propel itself back to the launch site. As it fell out of the sky at supersonic speeds, it set off sonic booms that astounded spectators but annoyed some residents.

Close to the ground, the engines fired again to slow the booster, which looked like a giant falling cigarette with the glow of the engines at the bottom.

As the booster descended near the launch tower, it swung back and forth, and flames rose along one side, but that did not seem to knock it off course. It nestled against the arms, which closed gently around the booster, catching it.

When the engines switched off, the booster was still hanging in midair.

“I don’t know what to say!” Gwynne Shotwell, the chief operating officer of SpaceX, said in a posting on X.

A small fire continued to burn at the base of the booster, but the flames soon extinguished.

The return of the booster to the launch site was similar to how the first stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket reenters the atmosphere before landing on a floating platform or a landing pad. SpaceX now does that routinely, but the boosters still have to be brought back to the launch site.

Musk envisions that Starships will be able to fly much more often, so SpaceX built a tower with mechanical arms nicknamed chopsticks. SpaceX also plans to use those arms to catch Starships when they return from orbit.

While the launch tower caught the booster in Texas, the upper-stage Starship vehicle continued on an arc into space toward the Indian Ocean. For this flight, SpaceX improved the thermal protection on Starship so that it could better withstand the searing heat of reentry.

At least one of the flaps looked like it suffered some damage during reentry, but Starship survived intact as it performed a soft landing on the water. It then exploded, which was not unexpected. SpaceX was not planning to recover the spacecraft.

A camera that SpaceX had set up on a buoy in the ocean captured Starship’s final moments, and the footage suggested that it landed almost exactly where it was aiming for.

While SpaceX’s commentators remained focused on the mission Sunday, the test flight occurred as Musk invested his time and money in supporting the campaign of former President Donald Trump. He appeared beside Trump at a rally this month in Butler, Pennsylvania, wearing a shirt that said “Occupy Mars,” and has asserted that Trump is the only candidate who will get humanity to Mars.

To get to Mars — or even land on the moon — SpaceX has more technical challenges to master. They include speeding up the pace of launches and demonstrating the ability to refill Starship’s propellant tanks while in orbit.

Musk is promising that the first Starships to Mars will depart in late 2026, the next time that Earth and Mars line up, and that if those initial landings go well, crewed flights will follow.

The sonic booms, which the Federal Aviation Administration had predicted when granting SpaceX permission to launch, could add another issue of contention among the agency, SpaceX and environmentalists who say that not enough is being done to protect people, property and wildlife from the launches.

Those complaints could grow as SpaceX is seeking permission to increase the number of Starship launches at its Texas site from five orbital launches a year to 25.

But SpaceX says regulators were hindering its progress, with this fifth test flight of Starship delayed for months by bureaucratic sluggishness. The FAA says it is working to protect public safety. At one point, the agency said it wouldn’t approve Sunday’s flight until late November, with a sign-off from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on environmental issues at the Texas launch site a factor in the delay.

There has been widespread evidence of environmental consequences to the region, as detailed in a New York Times investigation published in July.

After weeks of pressure by Musk, FAA approval came Saturday for the flight on Sunday. But some environmental caveats were attached.

The FAA said SpaceX had agreed to conduct studies of pea-size gravel the rocket sends into the adjacent state park “to determine the distance of the gravel plume and methods for protecting nests during launch events.”

SpaceX will also use drones with infrared cameras — which can detect animal nesting sites — during launches, and it will deploy environmental engineers before and after the launches to look for any harm to these birds and their nests.

The company may also be asked, if the Fish and Wildlife Service approves, to install temporary shelters to protect the nests during launches.

In public filings, the FAA had said that the air pressure, noise and sonic booms all would be more intense during Sunday’s test. During earlier flights, the booster descended over the Gulf of Mexico, much farther from homes.

The air pressure, the FAA said in a report made public Saturday, would be nearly strong enough to potentially cause minor damage to older plaster on homes not far from the launch site.

Planned post-flight inspections will show if the event caused any damage, and if so, how widespread it was. SpaceX, the FAA said, has insurance to cover the cost of any required structural repairs.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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