SpaceX will attempt historic catch of returning Starship booster on Sunday

Starship is ready to fly again — and for the first time, SpaceX is going to try to bring the booster back to the launch site to catch it with a pair of oversized “chopsticks.”

SpaceX will launch the mammoth Starship on Sunday in a launch window that opens at 5 AM PST (7 AM local time) from the company’s Starbase site in southeast Texas. This flight, which will be the fifth in the Starship development program, is coming a little sooner than expected: the Federal Aviation Administration had previously said that it did not anticipate issuing a modified launch license for this test before late November. 

That timeline gave much umbrage to SpaceX, leading the company to repeatedly call out what it characterized as the regulator’s inefficiency. But the world’s most powerful launcher will take to the skies sooner than expected after all, with the FAA announcing on Saturday it had approved the launch for tomorrow.

“The FAA determined 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, given that “the changes requested by SpaceX for Flight 6 are within the scope of what has been previously analyazed,” the FAA said.

The nearly 400-foot-tall Starship is at the centerpiece of SpaceX’s stated ambition to make life multi-planetary, but more immediately 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 out the capability to recover both stages and quickly refurbish them for future flights. 

So it makes sense that the primary objectives for this fifth flight test are two-fold: attempting the first-ever “catch” of the Super Heavy booster at the launch site and an on-target Starship reentry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

The latter goal has already been achieved: SpaceX nailed a controlled reentry and splashdown of the Starship upper stage during the last test mission in June. But the booster catch, as the company put it in a blog post, would be “singularly novel” in the history of rocketry.

The closest analogue is the now-routine Falcon 9 booster landings on autonomous barges and terrestrial landing zones. But for tomorrow’s launch, the plan is for the booster to slow to a hover and gently position itself inside the zone of two “chopstick” arms attached to the launch tower. Those arms would then close around the booster and hold it up after its engines stop firing. 

SpaceX noted in an update posted on its website that “thousands” of criteria showing healthy systems across the vehicle and pad must be met in order for the catch attempt to occur. If these are met, the mission’s Flight Director will issue a manual command to the booster prior to the completion of a trajectory-adjusting maneuver known as a boostback burn roughly 3 minutes and 40 seconds after lift-off.

“If this command is not sent prior to the completion of the boostback burn, or if automated health checks show unacceptable conditions with Super Heavy or the tower, the booster will default to a trajectory that takes it to a landing burn and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico,” the company said. 

The entire booster launch and return should take just 7 minutes. After it has detached, Starship will continue to ascend to orbit before coming down in the Indian Ocean roughly an hour after lift-off. 

While awaiting this launch license, SpaceX engineers have stayed very busy: in recent months, they have conducted numerous tests on the launch tower, completely replaced the rocket’s entire thermal protection system with newer tiles and a backup ablative layer, and updated the ship’s software for reentry. This week, engineers completed propellant loading tests and testing of the launch pad’s water deluge system, which is meant to protect the pad from the powerful fire of the booster’s 33 Raptor engines.

The company eventually plans on bringing the Starship upper stage back to the landing site too, though we’ll have to wait to see that in future test launches. 

“With each flight building on the learnings from the last, testing improvements in hardware and operations across every facet of Starship, we’re on the verge of demonstrating techniques fundamental to Starship’s fully and rapidly reusable design,” the company says. “By continuing to push our hardware in a flight environment, and doing so as safely and frequently as possible, we’ll rapidly bring Starship online and revolutionize humanity’s ability to access space.”

Watch a live webcast of the test starting around 30 minutes before liftoff (7 AM PST) on SpaceX’s website or on X.