SpaceX’s giant Starship spacecraft pulled off a remarkable feat on Saturday afternoon in the quest to build fully reusable rockets. For the first time, the spacecraft successfully returned from orbit to its launch site in South Texas, where it was caught between two mechanical arms on the launch tower.
For the past decade, SpaceX has successfully landed the boosters of its smaller Falcon 9 rockets and then reused them on subsequent launches. But the upper stages of the Falcon 9s are still thrown away each time.
The Starship rocket system is not only much larger than Falcon 9, but it was designed from the start to be fully reusable. Bringing back an upper stage from orbit is a major technical hurdle, and SpaceX was able to pull it off on its first try.
Jared Isaacman, the NASA administrator, offered his congratulations on X. “Making more believers by the day….one step closer to,” he wrote, adding an emoji of the moon and the American flag. Starship is slated to serve as one of two lander designs that will take astronauts to the surface of the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program.
Elon Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX, posted a video on X showing a view of Starship from below, part of the post-landing inspection.
A few hours earlier, the spacecraft, which is about 170 feet long, had been traveling at more than 17,000 miles per hour at an altitude of 170 miles. Then, one of its engines fired briefly, nudging it out of orbit to begin its fall back to Earth.
As Starship entered the atmosphere, the pressure and friction of air heated the belly of the spacecraft and slowed its velocity. When it reached the denser parts of the atmosphere, flaps at the front and back steered it as it passed over Mexico before returning to Starbase, SpaceX’s facility at the southern tip of Texas.
With the final landing burn, Starship pivoted to a vertical position, hovered and then slid between the mechanical arms that gently closed around it.
This was the 15th test flight of Starship, a mission that began when it launched on Friday afternoon. It was not a complete success. The bottom booster stage, known as Super Heavy, accomplished its main objective of pushing the upper-stage spacecraft through the densest part of the atmosphere and then dropped away.
SpaceX had hoped that it would be able to catch Super Heavy at the launchpad, much as it did with the upper stage on Saturday.
But as the booster headed back, it detected a problem and instead performed a simulated landing over the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX is still investigating what happened.
The Starship spacecraft continued to orbit and deployed 26 of the company’s next-generation Starlink satellites.
The words “DON’T PANIC” were printed on the side of the spacecraft, a reference to Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” This particular ship was No. 42 off the production line, and in Mr. Adams’s book, 42 was the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.
After about 22 hours and 14 orbits, Starship then returned to Earth.
Unlike Friday, when the skies over Starbase were cloudless and filled with sunshine, Saturday was cool, breezy and gray. In the final seconds, the spacecraft dropped through the clouds, and its engines fired one more time to pivot to vertical, hover and slide between the chopstick arms.
Now that Flight 15 has ended with a successful catch in Texas, Flight 16 could be the first Starship launch from SpaceX’s revamped launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Starbase launch site is not sufficient to serve SpaceX’s planned acceleration of Starship launches. Another Florida launchpad is under construction at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, and SpaceX has announced plans to build a huge launch complex in Louisiana.
SpaceX could also hit a major milestone next year if it can launch two Starships in quick succession, dock them together in orbit and then move liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellants from one Starship to the other.
This refueling maneuver is essential for Starship to leave low-Earth orbit. Without it, the spacecraft could not make it to the moon for NASA, or head to more distant destinations like Mars, where Mr. Musk hopes to send people someday.
SpaceX’s Starship is also slated to participate in its first NASA mission in the second half of next year. That flight, known as Artemis III, will stay in low-Earth orbit, where Starship will practice docking with NASA’s Orion crew capsule.
In the original mission design, Starship and Orion were to travel separately to lunar orbit and dock there. But SpaceX wants the two spacecraft to dock in low-Earth orbit and then have Starship provide the propulsion to get them to the moon.
