SpaceX successfully catches returning Starship booster

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

This test flight — the fifth in the Starship development program — took place Sunday morning at the company’s Starbase site in southeast Texas. 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 were 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 had 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. In today’s launch, the booster slowed to a hover and gently positioned itself inside the zone of two “chopstick” arms attached to the launch tower. Those arms then closed around the booster and hold it up after its engines stop firing. 

You can see the catch at around 40 minutes into SpaceX’s video of the test. Following the booster detachment and catch, Starship continued to ascend into orbit before splashing in the Indian Ocean and exploding (SpaceX had not planned to recover the spacecraft).

SpaceX noted in an update posted on its website that “thousands” of criteria showing healthy systems across the vehicle and pad had to be met for the catch attempt to occur. This test also took place 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 FAA announced on Saturday that it had approved the launch.

“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.

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.”

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