SpaceX launched its fifth test flight of its Starship rocket on Sunday.
SpaceX launched its fifth test flight of its Starship rocket on Sunday and made a dramatic first catch of the rocket’s more than 20-story tall booster.
Elon Musk’s company launched Starship at 8:25 a.m. ET from its Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas.
The rocket’s “Super Heavy” booster returned to land on the arms of the company’s launch tower nearly seven minutes after launch. The achievement marks a major milestone toward SpaceX’s goal of making Starship a fully reusable rocket system.
“Are you kidding me?” SpaceX communications manager Dan Huot said on the company’s webcast.
“What we just saw, that looked like magic”, Huot added.
Starship separated and continued on to space, aiming to travel halfway around the Earth before reentering the atmosphere and splashing down in the Indian Ocean.
The Federal Aviation Administration issued SpaceX with a license to launch Starship’s fifth flight on Saturday, sooner than the regulator previously estimated.
There are not any people on board the fifth Starship flight.
SpaceX has flown the full Starship rocket system on four spaceflight tests so far, with launches in April and November of last year, as well as this March and June. Each of the test flights have achieved more milestones than the last.
The company’s rocket successfully completed a flight test for the first time during the June flight, as Starship splashed down in the Indian Ocean after surviving the intense forces of reentering the atmosphere.
