SpaceX calls off nail-biting catch attempt as booster splashes down to Earth

CNN

By Jackie Wattles and Ashley Strickland, CNN

(CNN) — Just weeks after SpaceX stunned audiences with a precision landing of a giant rocket booster, the company conducted another test flight of the most powerful launch vehicle ever built. SpaceX again planned an attempt to steer the booster back into the mechanical arms — or “chopsticks”— of a launch tower, but did not meet the required criteria and has abandoned today’s attempt of the booster catch.

The nearly 400-foot-tall (121-meter) Starship system took flight on November 19 from the company’s Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas.

The two-stage megarocket — which features the Starship spacecraft stacked atop the Super Heavy booster — lifted off during a 30-minute window that opened at 5 p.m. ET Tuesday.

SpaceX livestreamed the event on the company’s X account.

President-elect Donald Trump attended the event. Trump was joined by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, in another example of Musk’s increasing role in Trump’s orbit.

This uncrewed trial marked the fastest turnaround time yet in SpaceX’s test campaign for Starship, which will play a key role in NASA’s cornerstone Artemis program. Aiming to put boots on the moon as soon as 2026, the space agency plans to use the rocket’s upper stage, the Starship spacecraft, as a lunar lander ferrying astronauts to the moon’s surface.

The goal of these test flights is to hash out how SpaceX might one day recover and rapidly refly Super Heavy boosters and Starship spacecraft for future missions. Quickly reusing rocket parts is considered essential to drastically reducing the time and cost of getting cargo — or ships of people — to space.

“Congrats to @SpaceX on Starship’s sixth test flight. Exciting to see the Raptor engine restart in space — major progress towards orbital flight. Starship’s success is #Artemis’ success. Together, we will return humanity to the Moon & set our sights on Mars,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, after the splashdown of Starship in the Indian Ocean.

Developing Starship, a reusable launch system

The Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses commercial rocket launches, said it did not have to undertake the lengthy process of reviewing a launch license alteration because the flight path of this week’s test flight is expected to closely mimic an earlier test flight.

“The FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental and other licensing requirements for the suborbital test flight,” the agency said in a statement. “The FAA determined the changes requested by SpaceX for (Tuesday’s test flight) are within the scope of what has been previously analyzed.”

The fifth integrated test flight of Starship launched on October 13, garnering international attention with SpaceX’s ambitious attempt to maneuver the 232-foot-tall (71-meter) Super Heavy back to a gargantuan landing structure after the booster broke away from the Starship spacecraft.

A pair of giant metal pincers, which SpaceX calls “chopsticks,” successfully caught the Super Heavy midair.

“Starship’s fifth flight test was a seminal moment in iterating towards a fully and rapidly reusable launch system,” the company said in a statement.

Starship is considered crucial to SpaceX’s founding mission of eventually carrying humans to Mars for the first time.

For NASA’s Artemis program, SpaceX has government contracts worth up to nearly $4 billion to complete the task of developing a cost-effective space transportation system.

Starship’s flight path

When the countdown clock struck zero Tuesday afternoon, the Super Heavy booster fired up its 33 powerful Raptor engines and propelled the Starship spacecraft, which rides atop the booster, into space.

After expending most of its fuel and detaching from the Starship spacecraft, the Super Heavy booster reversed course and steered itself back toward the launch site. The booster was intended to conduct another precision landing into the arms of the launch and landing structure — nicknamed “Mechazilla” by Musk — at the company’s Starbase facility.

But the test flight team did not deem conditions favorable for a landing attempt, and the booster splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Texas.

“Analogous to the fifth flight test, distinct vehicle and pad criteria must be met prior to a return and catch of the Super Heavy booster, which will require healthy systems on the booster and tower and a final manual command from the mission’s Flight Director,” according to SpaceX.

“If this command is not sent prior to the completion of the boostback burn, or if automated health checks show unacceptable conditions with Super Heavy or the tower, the booster will default to a trajectory that takes it to a landing burn and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. We accept no compromises when it comes to ensuring the safety of the public and our team, and the return will only take place if conditions are right.”

The Starship spacecraft, meanwhile, fired up its own six engines before entering a coasting phase as it soared through space. The capsule briefly reignited an engine about half an hour later before bracing for reentry — the process by which it veers back into the thickest part of Earth’s atmosphere.

It’s the first time Starship has successfully ignited one of its Raptor engines while in space, according to SpaceX.

That’s a big deal, explained Garret Reisman, a former NASA astronaut who now advises for SpaceX.

“They’re finicky little beasts — (the Starship rocket engines) — and it’s not so easy to light them up and shut them down and light them up again,” Reisman told CNN.

Starship then aimed to test its limits with an aggressive angle of reentry as it headed toward splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

“We’re going to fly the ship at an aggressive angle of attack once it’s moving slower than the speed of sound,” SpaceX engineer Jessie Anderson said on the livestream. “This means we’ll be flying nose down instead of our usual belly flop orientation during final descent. This will — no doubt — stress the limits of the flaps’ ability to maintain control, but it will be a chance to get real flight data on what our limits actually are.”

The “flaps” are small wings attached to the side of the Starship vehicle meant to brace the winds of reentry and help slow the vehicle down.

The company also tested Starship’s limits by removing some protective shielding off the vehicle to see whether it could survive without it.

Starship made a safe landing in the Indian Ocean and remained intact despite the rough landing trajectory.

“Turns out the vehicle had more capability than our calculations predicted, and that is why we test like we fly,” SpaceX engineer Kate Tice said.

Greg Autry, the associate provost for space commercialization and strategy at the University of Central Florida, said operations Tuesday evening “looked really good.”

Autry thinks the company may have opted for a sea landing of the booster out of an “abundance of caution,” as President-elect Donald Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk were in attendance to view the test launch.

“I don’t know what the decision-making process was yet of the failure mode or maybe they just want to be careful not to kill the president-elect of the United States by any chance,” he said.

Autry is a rumored candidate for Trump’s NASA administrator pick. In a statement to CNN on Tuesday, the Trump campaign said, “President-Elect Trump is making decisions on who will serve in his second Administration. Those decisions will continue to be announced by him when they are made.”

During the fourth integrated Starship test flight in early June, the spacecraft endured significant damage. The Starship spacecraft shed numerous heat tiles designed to shield the vehicle from intense temperatures caused by the pressure and friction of reentry.

“Because of lost tiles … the forward flaps were so melted it was like trying to control it with little skeleton hands,” Musk said after that mission, adding that the fourth flight landed roughly 6 miles (9.7 kilometers) away from its intended splashdown site in the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX made significant strides, however, during Starship’s fifth integrated test flight in mid-October.

Ahead of that mission, SpaceX implemented what it called a “complete rework of (Starship’s) heatshield, with SpaceX technicians spending more than 12,000 hours replacing the entire thermal protection system with newer-generation tiles, a backup ablative layer, and additional protections between the flap structures.”

A successful test flight on Tuesday could cue up SpaceX to begin tackling more ambitious projects, and it remains to be seen how the aborted attempt of the booster catch will factor in to those next steps. SpaceX has always said it would evaluate flight data and make a decision about a landing attempt based on real-time flight data.

“In 2025, SpaceX plans to undertake a long-duration flight test and a propellant transfer flight test,” according to a recent report from NASA’s Office of the Inspector General, or OIG.

Demonstrating the ability to launch a Starship into orbit and then rendezvous the spacecraft with a tanker carrying fuel is considered essential to the success of NASA’s Artemis program.

For the human moon landing mission, called Artemis III, Starship may need to dock with more than a dozen fuel tankers before continuing its mission to the lunar surface.

SpaceX will also face a “critical design review” for the Artemis III mission next summer, according to the OIG.

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