SpaceX Starship fourth test spaceflight successfully splashes down

SpaceX completed the first test flight of its Starship rocket on Thursday, reaching a new milestone in the development of the massive spacecraft.

“This was the first time we’ve ever landed a spacecraft after launching into space,” SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot said on the company’s broadcast. “It was an incredible experience.”

Elon Musk’s company launched Starship at around 8:50 a.m. ET from its Starbase facility near Boca Chica, Texas.

Minutes after liftoff, the rocket’s booster splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico, marking another development milestone and the first time SpaceX has returned a booster intact. The controlled return of a booster is key to the company’s long-term goal of regularly launching and landing Starship, and is routinely performed with its Falcon 9 rocket.

About an hour after launch, it was revealed that Starship had safely survived re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, and the company confirmed that the rocket had splashed down in the Indian Ocean, completing its mission. Starship appeared to have survived external damage from the intense heat of re-entry, with debris clearly visible in the broadcast.

“Splash landing confirmed!” SpaceX posted on social media after the flight.

Starship’s fourth spaceflight was unmanned, and company executives have previously stressed that SpaceX plans to fly hundreds of Starship missions before putting crew members on its rockets.

The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and is intended to provide a new means of transporting cargo and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also crucial to NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the Moon. SpaceX has been awarded a multi-billion dollar contract by NASA to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA’s Artemis lunar program.

Shortly after the flight, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated SpaceX on its progress.

“Through the Artemis program, we are one step closer to returning humans to the Moon, and then on to Mars,” Nelson wrote in a social media post.

SpaceX has previously launched the entire Starship rocket system on three spaceflight tests, in April, November and March 2023. Each test flight achieved more milestones than the last, but each result up until Thursday ended with the rocket being destroyed before the end of the flight.

On its third test flight, SpaceX tested new features, including the ability to open and close a payload door once in space (a way for the rocket to deploy satellites or other payloads on future missions) and transfer fuel in-flight in a NASA demonstration.

SpaceX has placed great importance on an approach to Starship development that builds “on what we’ve learned from past flights.” The company says its strategy is focused on “iterative improvement” of the rocket, so even if a test flight burns out, it would still represent progress toward its goal of a fully reusable rocket capable of taking humans to the Moon and Mars.

Musk said last year that the company expected to spend about $2 billion on Starship’s development in 2023.

Starship is the tallest and most powerful rocket ever launched. Fully loaded onto the Super Heavy booster, Starship will stand 397 feet tall and have a diameter of about 30 feet.

The 232-foot-tall Super Heavy booster will be the start of the rocket’s journey into space. At its base are 33 Raptor engines that produce a combined 16.7 million pounds of thrust, nearly double the 8.8 million pounds of thrust produced by NASA’s Space Launch System rocket. It will be available for the first time in 2022.

The 165-foot-tall Starship itself is equipped with six Raptor engines, three of which are used in Earth’s atmosphere and three for operation in the vacuum of space.

The rocket runs on liquid oxygen and liquid methane, with the entire system requiring more than 10 million pounds of propellant for launch.