SpaceX Starship launch ends with a dramatic water landing

SpaceX’s latest test flight of its Starship vehicle Tuesday got off to a sobering start, as the company was unable to recover the enormous booster stage of the rocket, the most powerful ever built. But about an hour later, the vehicle’s upper stage was more successful with the completion of a daring maneuver to splash down in the Indian Ocean.

The late-afternoon launch brought President-elect Donald Trump to the company’s South Texas launch site along the Gulf of Mexico for a show of solidarity with Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and the world’s richest man, who helped catapult the former president back to the White House.

The two men were shown discussing the launch and its aftermath. But SpaceX’s highly produced video livestream of the flight stuck to rocket science, as the company’s engineers highlighted their work in pursuit of Musk’s dream of sending people to Mars in the years ahead. And Tuesday’s flight offered contrasting moments of the company’s engineering achievements and the work that remains to be completed to build a rapidly reusable rocket.

“Development testing, by definition, is unpredictable,” said Jessie Anderson, a manufacturing engineering manager at SpaceX and a host of the live broadcast. “But that is exactly why we test.”

The Starship rocket system is the largest ever built — 397 feet tall, or about 90 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty, including the pedestal.

And Starship has the most engines ever in a rocket booster: The Super Heavy booster — the bottom part of the rocket — has 33 of SpaceX’s powerful Raptor engines sticking out of its bottom. As those engines lifted Starship off the launchpad, they generated 16 million pounds of thrust at full throttle.

The upper part, also called Starship or Ship for short, looks like a shiny rocket from science fiction movies of the 1950s and is made of stainless steel with large fins. This stage will head toward orbit and ultimately could carry people to the moon or even Mars.

The rocket lifted off on time at 4 p.m. Central time from the launch site nicknamed Starbase near the city of Brownsville. The company announced during the livestream that a plush banana was placed in the vehicle’s cargo hold.

A goal of the flight was for Super Heavy, the large booster stage, to snap back into its original place on the liftoff tower, as happened in October when the booster was caught by a pair of mechanical “chopsticks.” But after an initial “go for catch” command minutes into the flight, an updated command was given for the booster to skip the complicated maneuver, and the booster instead performed a smoky splashdown into the Gulf of Mexico.

“It was pretty epic on Attempt 1,” Kate Tice, a senior quality engineering manager at SpaceX, said of the last test flight’s tower catch on the company’s livestream. “But the safety of the teams and the public and the pad itself are paramount.”

SpaceX has not yet provided a reason for the last-minute change.

While the booster did not make it back to the launch tower, the rocket’s upper stage traveled on for about an hour.

As with earlier test flights, Tuesday’s flight vehicle did not enter orbit but instead traveled on a suborbital path that, by design, took it over the middle of the Indian Ocean. That way, if anything went wrong, the rocket would still splash down harmlessly in the water.

Around 35 minutes into the journey, Starship achieved an important objective of the test flight, as engineers reignited an engine in space for the first time, a crucial step that will be needed to bring a future vehicle back to the ground from orbit.

“Exciting to see the Raptor engine restart in space — major progress towards orbital flight,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, wrote in a post on Musk’s social-media platform, X.

“Starship’s success is Artemis’ success,” Nelson added, referring to the program to send NASA astronauts back to the moon, for which SpaceX has received $4.4 billion in government contracts. “Together, we will return humanity to the Moon & set our sights on Mars.”

The flight continued, with plasma building up beneath the spacecraft, as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere, surrounding the vehicle in a colorful glow.

Moments later, flaps on the Starship vehicle steered the spacecraft first into a nosedive. The flaps, with the help of the rocket’s engines, then steered the silvery vessel back into a vertical orientation similar to the position Starship may assume when it returns to the launchpad on future flights.

“Starship has landed,” an engineer said calmly from the control room, as the vehicle’s plunge into the water was met with whistles and cheers from viewers in the crowd.

Though the SpaceX livestream stayed away from political commentary, Trump’s attendance at the launch signals a growing bond between the president-elect and Musk.

Last week, Trump announced that Musk would lead a yet-to-be-created government agency, and Musk has become a central figure in Trump’s transition.

Although the two men became close allies only recently, Trump had long expressed admiration for Musk’s rocket launches and would frequently reference SpaceX during campaign speeches.

At the same time, the SpaceX founder has complained that the pace of Starship testing has been slowed through unnecessary environmental reviews by the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates private space launches, and by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The new presidential administration could streamline regulatory procedures and pick up the pace of Starship flights, speeding up Musk’s dreams of using Starship to send astronauts to Mars.

While NASA is planning to use a version of Starship as a moon lander for its astronauts, Trump could shift NASA’s focus to sending astronauts to the red planet instead.

Musk has said SpaceX planned to launch uncrewed Starships to Mars in 2026 to test the ability to land there, and if successful, people could be aboard for a future opportunity. Earth and Mars align every 26 months.

Musk has also suggested that the FAA under Trump could allow Starship to conduct suborbital flights taking passengers halfway around the world in half an hour.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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