SpaceX Starship rocket launch: Flight 5 catches a booster

SpaceX launched its fifth test flight of its Starship rocket on Sunday and made a dramatic first capture of the rocket's more than 20-story-tall booster.

The achievement marks a major milestone toward SpaceX's goal of making Starship a fully reusable rocket system.

Elon Musk's company launched Starship at 8:25 a.m. ET from its Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas. The rocket's “Super Heavy” booster landed back on the arms of the company's launch tower almost seven minutes after launch.

“Are you kidding me?” SpaceX communications manager Dan Huot said on the company's webcast.

“What we just saw seemed magical,” Huot added.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated SpaceX in a social media post.

“As we prepare to return to the Moon under Artemis, continued testing will prepare us for the bold missions ahead,” Nelson wrote.

The spacecraft separated and continued into space, traveling halfway to Earth before re-entering the atmosphere and falling into the Indian Ocean as planned to complete the test.

There were no people aboard the fifth Starship flight. Company leadership has said SpaceX expects to fly hundreds of Starship missions before the crewed rocket launches.

The entire Starship system has conducted four spaceflight tests previously, with launches in April and November of last year, as well as in March and June. Each of the test flights has achieved more milestones than the last.

SpaceX emphasizes that it intends to leverage “what we've learned from previous flights” in its approach to developing the massive rocket.

The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and aims to become a new method of transporting cargo and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also critical to NASA's plan to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX won a multimillion-dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA's Artemis lunar program.

The Federal Aviation Administration granted SpaceX a license to launch the fifth Starship flight on Saturday, earlier than the regulator had previously estimated. But the company wanted to launch the fifth flight before October, prompting SpaceX and Musk to openly criticize the FAA, saying “superfluous environmental analyses” were delaying the process.

While the FAA and partner agencies from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Commerce's National Marine Fisheries Service conducted assessments more quickly than anticipated, SpaceX also had to pay fines to environmental regulators for unauthorized water discharges at its Texas launch site.

With the capture of the booster, SpaceX has surpassed the milestones of the fourth test flight.

The company completed its goal of returning the booster to the launch site and used the turret's “stick” arms to catch the vehicle. The company sees the ambitious capture approach as critical to its goal of making the rocket fully reusable.

“SpaceX engineers have spent years preparing and months testing the booster capture attempt, and technicians have spent tens of thousands of hours building the infrastructure to maximize our chances of success,” the company wrote on its website.

Capture requires thousands of criteria to be met, the company said. If it had not been ready, the booster would have deviated from its return trajectory to fall off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

“We accept no compromises when it comes to ensuring the safety of the public and our team, and return will only be attempted if conditions are suitable,” SpaceX said.

Starship is the tallest and most powerful rocket ever launched. Fully stacked atop the Super Heavy booster, Starship measures 397 feet tall and approximately 30 feet in diameter.

The Super Heavy booster, which measures 232 feet tall, is what begins the rocket's journey into space. At its base are 33 Raptor engines, which together produce 16.7 million pounds of thrust, about double the 8.8 million pounds of thrust of NASA's Space Launch System rocket, which was first launched. time in 2022.

The 165-foot-tall Starship itself has six Raptor engines: three for use in Earth's atmosphere and three for operation in the vacuum of space.

The rocket runs on liquid oxygen and liquid methane. The entire system requires more than 10 million pounds of propellant to launch.