SpaceX Starship rocket launch: Flight 5 picks up the booster

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

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

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

“Are you kidding me?” Dan Huett, SpaceX's director of communications, said in the company's webcast.

“What we just saw looked like magic,” Huot added.

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

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

The spacecraft separated and continued its journey into space, traveling halfway around Earth before reentering the atmosphere and falling into the Indian Ocean with the aim of completing the test.

There were no people on board the fifth spacecraft flight. SpaceX expects to launch hundreds of Starship missions before launching the rocket with any crew, the company's leadership said.

The complete spacecraft system has performed four spaceflight tests previously, launching in April and November last year, as well as in March and June. Each test flight accomplished more than the last.

SpaceX stresses that it is trying to build “on what we have 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 way to transport goods and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also crucial to NASA's plan to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX has won a multibillion-dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA's Artemis Moon program.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a license to SpaceX to launch the fifth flight of its Starship vehicle on Saturday, sooner than the regulator had previously expected. But the company wanted to launch the fifth flight before October, prompting both SpaceX and Musk to openly criticize the FAA, saying “redundant environmental analysis” was hampering the process.

While the Federal Aviation Administration and partner agencies at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Commerce's National Marine Fisheries Service conducted assessments more quickly than expected, SpaceX also had to pay fines to environmental regulators related to unauthorized water discharges. At its launch site in Texas.

Thanks to the boosted catch, SpaceX has surpassed the milestones of its fourth test flight.

The company completed its goal of returning the booster to the launch site and used the “chopstick” arms on the tower to catch the rover. The company sees the ambitious hunting approach as critical to achieving its goal of making the missile fully reusable.

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

The company said the catch requires meeting thousands of criteria. If it had not been ready, the rocket would have been diverted from its return trajectory and instead landed off the coast in the Gulf of Mexico.

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

Starship is the longest and most powerful rocket ever launched. The Starship spacecraft, fully stacked on a Super Heavy booster, is 397 feet long and about 30 feet in diameter.

The super-heavy booster, measuring 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 from NASA's Space Launch System rocket, which first launched in 2022.

The spacecraft itself, which stands 165 feet tall, has six Raptor engines — three for use while in Earth's atmosphere and three for operation in the vacuum of space.

The missile operates with liquid oxygen and liquid methane. The complete system requires more than 10 million pounds of propellant to launch.