On Fourth Launch, SpaceX's Starship Sticks the Landing

On its fourth launch, SpaceX’s Starship reached a destination more or less intact that had eluded it on three previous test flights: the oceans of Earth.

This journey for the world’s most powerful rocket began at 8:50 a.m. Thursday when it lifted off from the company’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, with 32 of its 33 Raptor methane-fueled engines lit.

Starship’s subsequent climb to space turned out to be the least exciting part of this mission–except for those people lucky enough to watch, hear, and feel the launch in person. The avalanche of air pressure thrown off by a large launch vehicle’s engines at liftoff will literally thump you in the chest from a few miles away.

Starship’s first stage completed its burn while the second stage’s six Raptor engines lit in a hot-staging handoff that was followed by the second stage firing until a shutdown as planned 94 miles up, putting that stage on a suborbital trajectory to a hoped-for landing in the Indian Ocean.

But first, the booster had to make its way to the Gulf of Mexico intact. And this time, it did, with a series of braking burns allowing the booster to lower itself into the waves, as live video footage showed water splashing around its base.

SpaceX needed three tries to get its Falcon 9 booster to a soft landing in the Atlantic, but the practice it’s gained since from hundreds of successful first-stage landings seems to have paid off for Starship.

People watching the livestream shared by SpaceX’s X account had to wait another half hour to see the figurative and literal fireworks for Starship’s second stage. 

While that vehicle coasted out of coverage above the atmosphere to a peak altitude of about 132 miles, SpaceX instead treated viewers to an apt soundtrack: Strauss’s “The Blue Danube,” a nod to that waltz’s appearance in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Forty-five minutes into the flight, Starship began a risky reentry. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had suggested it might not survive this in a May 30 X reply that revealed that Starship’s 18,000 hexagonal heat-shielding tiles had effectively zero margin for error.

“Right now, we are not resilient to loss of a single tile in most places, as the secondary containment material will probably not survive,” he wrote. “This is a thorny issue indeed, given that vast resources have been applied to solve it, thus far to no avail.”

Starship’s last test flight on March 14 demonstrated that risk when the upper stage lost control and burned up during reentry about 40 miles up. On Thursday’s flight, the upper stage escaped that fate but got more than a little cooked on the way down. 

The video streamed via SpaceX’s Starlink broadband-satellite constellation showed a glow of plasma building up around the spacecraft as it encountered the first traces of Earth’s atmosphere that steadily built up and began changing colors, like an artificial aurora. SpaceX commentators and flight controllers called out its progress through peak heating some 44 miles up.

At 36 miles up, past the point where Starship had met a fiery end on the last flight, the video showed the skin on one of the vehicle’s control flaps peeling off and revealing the framework underneath. Then the camera lens cracked, but speed and altitude telemetry showed Starship remained in a controlled descent.

With a final braking burn, the vehicle—or whatever was left of it—managed to slow to about 6 miles an hour when it reached the water. We very much hope there is drone footage of that moment. 

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson posted his congratulations on X, sharing SpaceX’s video of Starship’s first stage touching down in the water: “We are another step closer to returning humanity to the Moon through #Artemis—then looking onward to Mars.”

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The space agency is banking on Starship to help it return astronauts to the Moon as part of its Artemis project, having granted SpaceX a $2.89 billion contract in April 2021 to develop a lunar-landing version of its second stage that will take astronauts from lunar orbit to the Moon’s surface and back. 

(Last May, the space agency awarded a $3.4 billion lunar lander contract to Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-backed space firm that plans to fly its New Glenn heavy-lift rocket later this year. This vehicle-redundancy strategy notched a major accomplishment Wednesday with the successful launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule on its first crewed flight to the International Space Station.)

SpaceX also plans to shift to Starship to deploy larger, third-generation Starlink satellites, and Musk has repeatedly emphasized how this vehicle’s massive capacity—with refueling in orbit, the current design can send more than 110 tons of payload to the Moon—will allow for human settlement of the Moon and later Mars. 

Thursday’s successful mission represented a big step toward those goals and showed how far SpaceX has progressed since a first test flight last April that ended early with the rocket careening out of control and exploding 24 miles up. The second, on Nov. 18, saw Starship fly through staging but then ended with both stages exploding, the second just before it would have completed its planned burn to reach space. 

SpaceX has not announced details about a fifth Starship test flight. But in a post-flight X reply to retired Canadian astronaut and former ISS Commander Chris Hadfield, Musk emphasized that SpaceX’s goal is not just getting Starship back to Earth intact and in need of refurbishment like the Space Shuttle, but ready for refueling and relaunch.

“A fully and immediately reusable orbital heat shield, which (as you know) has never been made before, is the single toughest problem remaining,” he said. “Being able to iterate with many ideas on many ships is key to solving this.”