“Big step toward making life multiplanetary was made today,” Musk posted on X after Sunday’s launch.
For years, SpaceX has been landing the booster of its reusable Falcon 9 rocket on barges at sea or a landing pad on land. SpaceX then transports the rocket for refurbishment before bringing it back to the launchpad. The second stage of the Falcon 9, however, is discarded. Having Starship, which is intended to be fully reusable, return to its launch site marks a significant step toward the airline-like operations SpaceX is seeking, where the booster would land, be refuelled and fly again.
Precise landings are also important for the missions to the moon. Nasa is investing about $4 billion ($6.5b) into the programme and intends to use Starship to return its astronauts to the lunar surface as part of its Artemis programme. The space agency intends to explore the lunar South Pole, where a treacherous topography of ridges and craters and a low-angled light means the spacecraft visiting there will have to be able to land in defined areas. Nasa has identified 13 such sites that are flat and near resources, such as water.
On Sunday, the rocket lifted off from its launch site near Brownsville, Texas, at 8.25am Eastern time and carried the spacecraft upward through the atmosphere. The rocket booster then dropped away as the Starship spacecraft continued higher.
The decision to move forward with the rocket catch was not made until after the rocket began falling back to Earth. Thousands of “distinct vehicle and pad criteria” had to be met before the catch manoeuvre could proceed, according to SpaceX. If those conditions had not been met, the rocket booster would have defaulted to a trajectory that would have splashed it down in the Gulf of Mexico. But the mission’s flight director ultimately gave it the go-ahead.
The rocket booster fell at an angle before the engines started firing once again, slowing its descent. The chopstick arms closed slowly around the booster as the rocket landed parallel to the tower. Flames continued to be emitted from the rocket for a few seconds as it hung from the closed arms, and then stopped.
The successful launch elicited cheers from SpaceX staffers watching from the ground and plaudits from spaceflight experts, who saw the landing as an ambitious but risky step. SpaceX said its engineers had been making “extensive upgrades” to its hardware and software to prepare for the rocket catch.
“I admit I did not expect this to work,” wrote Jonathan McDowell, astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in a post on X showing the rocket suspended from the tower arms.
With each flight test, the company has made significant progress, which Nasa is counting on. Nasa administrator Bill Nelson has said the spacecraft is vital to the agency’s lunar ambitions at a time when it is in a space race with China and many other countries, including India and Japan, that are aiming for the moon.
In a post on Sunday, Nelson congratulated SpaceX on the successful test flight, which he said would forward the agency’s moon exploration work.
“As we prepare to go back to the moon under Artemis, continued testing will prepare us for the bold missions that lie ahead, including to the South Pole region of the Moon and then on to Mars,” Nelson wrote.
SpaceX still has a long way to go before Starship is ready to fly to the moon. To reach the lunar surface, some 240,000 miles away, the company is planning to refuel the spacecraft in Earth orbit with a fleet of tanker ships. That would require a high number of launches and a complex choreography in space that has never been done before.
Still, landing with pinpoint accuracy represents “an enormous step forward in human capability today”, former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield wrote on X. “Makes me even more excited for our collective future.”
Written by: Aaron Gregg, Christian Davenport
