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SpaceX reached a significant milestone in its Starship rocket development program on Thursday when the massive vehicle survived a fiery, hypersonic return from space and achieved a breakthrough landing demonstration in the Indian Ocean. This accomplishment marked the completion of a full test mission around the globe, a feat that had eluded the company in its previous three attempts, which resulted in explosions or disintegration of the rocket.
The Starship system, standing at an impressive height of nearly 400 feet (120 meters), is a two-stage rocket comprised of the Starship vessel mounted atop the towering Super Heavy rocket booster. The launch took place at 7:50 a.m. CDT (1250 GMT) from SpaceX’s Starbase launch site near Boca Chica Village in South Texas, sending powerful shockwaves rippling through the Gulf Coast’s morning fog.
At an altitude of 74 km (46 miles), the Super Heavy booster detached from the Starship upper stage, which ignited its own engines to ascend further toward space. Meanwhile, the Super Heavy executed a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, demonstrating a touchdown capability that would otherwise occur on land.
In space, a SpaceX livestream showed the Starship, outfitted with onboard cameras, coasting at an altitude of roughly 200 km (125 miles) and a speed of around 16,000 miles (25,750 km) per hour as it made its way toward the Indian Ocean for its planned return to Earth, setting the stage for a key demonstration of its reusable design.
The path to this achievement was not without challenges. The rocket’s first launch in April 2023 exploded minutes after liftoff, around 25 miles (40 km) above ground, while its second attempt in November blew up after reaching space. The third test flight in March made it much farther but broke apart during atmospheric reentry some 64 km (40 miles) over the Indian Ocean.
On Thursday, Starship appeared to have overcome those past technical hurdles. Beginning at about 45 minutes into the flight, onboard cameras showed a field of superhot plasma forming around the spacecraft’s exterior, marking with hues of orange, red, bluish purple, and green the start of its blazing hot plunge through Earth’s atmosphere.
As Starship’s descent was slowed by violent atmospheric friction, bits of metal and its hexagonal heat-shield tiles began flying off, and parts of the rocket’s steering flaps were stripped to a skeleton, though they remained functional. Starship then reignited an engine to flip itself upright in mid-descent, as it would for a landing on the ground or on the moon, before ultimately splashing into the Indian Ocean, as confirmed by waves of water seen through an onboard camera’s broken, debris-covered lens.
“Despite the loss of many tiles and a damaged flap, Starship made it all the way to a soft landing in the ocean!” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who had stated that Starship’s reentry was the mission’s biggest goal, posted on social media after the splashdown.
The rocket was partly covered with hundreds of small black tiles designed to protect against the extreme heat encountered while diving through Earth’s atmosphere at hypersonic speeds.
Intended to be cheaper and more powerful than SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, Starship’s fully reusable design represents the future of the company’s dominant satellite launch and astronaut business. It is due to be used by NASA in the next few years to land the first astronauts on the moon since 1972.
However, much is riding on SpaceX’s development of Starship, as NASA is relying on it to return astronauts to the moon in 2026 in a rivalry with China, which plans to send its astronauts there by 2030. China has made several recent advances in its lunar program, including a second landing on the moon’s far side in a sample retrieval mission.
Despite Starship’s development appearing quicker than other rocket programs, it has been slower than Musk originally envisioned. A Japanese billionaire who in 2018 paid to fly Starship around the moon, at the time expected to occur last year, canceled his flight last week, citing schedule uncertainties.
A Reuters investigation found that Musk’s drive to rapidly build Starship has endangered SpaceX workers in Texas and California.
Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002, has stated that Starship must launch hundreds of times before it carries humans, suggesting it could be years before the rocket flies crews or lands astronauts on the lunar surface.
While SpaceX routinely flies astronauts to and from the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit for NASA using its Crew Dragon capsule, which launches atop the company’s Falcon 9 rocket, no private company has ever sent humans to the moon.
