SpaceX Successfully Captures Return of Starship Booster

For the first time, SpaceX not only launched its gigantic Starship, but also returned the booster to the launch site and picked it up with a pair of huge “chopsticks.”

This test flight – the fifth in Starship’s development program – took place on Sunday morning at the company’s Starbase facility in southeast Texas. The nearly 400-foot-tall Starship is at the centerpiece of SpaceX’s stated ambition to make life multiplanetary, but more immediately in NASA’s ambitious Artemis campaign to return humans to the surface of the moon.

SpaceX envisions rapid reuse of the entire Starship vehicle, which includes an upper stage (also called Starship) and a Super Heavy booster — but that means proving the ability to recover both stages and quickly renew them for future flights.

So it makes sense that the main objectives of this fifth flight test were twofold: attempting the first “capture” of the Super Heavy booster at the launch site and a reentry and landing of the Starship at the target in the Indian Ocean.

The latter goal had already been achieved: SpaceX achieved a controlled re-entry and splashdown of the Starship’s upper stage during the last test mission in June. But capturing the booster, as the company put it in a blog post, would be “singularly new” in the history of rockets.

The closest analogue is the now routine Falcon 9 booster landings on autonomous barges and land landing zones. At today’s launch, the booster slowed to a hover and positioned itself gently within the zone of two “stick” arms attached to the launch tower. These arms then closed around the thruster and held it after its engines stopped working.

You can see the capture around the 40-minute mark of the SpaceX test video. After detachment and capture of the booster, Starship continued to climb into orbit before crashing into the Indian Ocean and exploding (SpaceX had not planned to recover the spacecraft).

SpaceX noted in an update posted to its website that “thousands” of criteria showing healthy systems across the vehicle and platform had to be met for the capture attempt to take place. This test also occurred a little earlier than expected: The Federal Aviation Administration had previously said it did not anticipate issuing a modified launch permit for this test before the end of November.

This schedule greatly offended SpaceX, leading the company to repeatedly denounce what it characterized as the regulator’s inefficiency. But the FAA announced Saturday that it approved the launch.

“The FAA determined that SpaceX met all safety, environmental and other licensing requirements for the suborbital test flight,” the regulator said in a statement. Notably, the authorization also includes approval for the next test flight, as “the changes requested by SpaceX for Flight 6 are within the scope of what was previously reviewed,” the FAA said.

While waiting for this launch permit, SpaceX engineers have remained very busy: over the past few months, they have performed numerous tests on the launch tower, completely replaced the rocket’s entire thermal protection system with newer plates and a backup ablative layer, and upgraded the ship’s software for reentry. This week, engineers completed propellant loading tests and tests of the launch pad’s water deluge system, which aims to protect the pad from the powerful fire of the booster’s 33 Raptor engines.

The company eventually plans to bring Starship’s upper stage back to the landing site as well, though we’ll have to wait and see on that in future test launches.

“With each flight building on learnings from the previous, testing hardware and operations improvements across all facets of Starship, we are about to demonstrate techniques fundamental to the fully and rapidly reusable design of Starship,” the company states. “By continuing to push our hardware in a flight environment, and doing so as safely and frequently as possible, we will quickly bring Starship online and revolutionize humanity’s ability to access space.”

Anthony Ha contributed to this report, which has been updated to reflect the successful test flight.