SpaceX Starship Ship Caught by Tower Arms After Orbital Flight, Advancing Reusable Rocket Goal

On Saturday, Nov. 14, a charred, 52-meter Starship fell out of thick clouds over the Texas Gulf Coast, lit its engines to flip upright, and settled slowly into the giant mechanical arms of the tower it had left a day earlier. Its engines were still roaring as it came in. Then they shut down, and the ship hung motionless, ending the longest mission yet flown by the Starship system.

The flight began on Friday, when the Super Heavy booster lifted the ship off from SpaceX's Starbase facilities in Texas. The booster did not complete its part of the plan. About 10 minutes after liftoff it failed to make a similar return to the launch pad, which ended SpaceX's hope of recovering both halves of the rocket for the first time.

The upper stage carried on. It orbited Earth 14 times over 22.5 hours. On Friday night, cruising at roughly 260 km in altitude, it deployed 26 Starlink satellites. On Saturday it fired one of its engines to begin its descent, flying eastward over the Pacific Ocean. Its orbital speed of about 27,359 kmh had to bleed off against blistering heat until the ship was in a supersonic free-fall above Starbase.

With its aerodynamic fins folded back, the ship was gripped by arms on the launch tower, the system the company calls "Mechazilla." Two small fittings near the top of Starship hooked onto the arms as they closed in, and the vessel hung a few hundred feet off the ground. SpaceX mission commentator Dan Huot called it "the missing link, the holy grail of spaceflight." Within hours, Elon Musk and SpaceX engineers were inspecting the ship. Musk posted photos and videos from the tower on X, writing, "Ship 42 looks great!"

The catch matters because of how SpaceX makes its money. Its dominance in launch rests on the Falcon 9, which has flown more than 700 times since 2010. That rocket's first stage is reusable, but its second stage, the part that delivers payloads to orbit, is discarded into the ocean after every flight. Musk wants a system that flies to space and back at the pace and with the minimal refurbishment of commercial aircraft. He also sees Starship as the future workhorse for the Starlink satellite business, and for ambitions that include data centres in orbit, returning humans to the moon and eventually settling Mars.

Still, the milestone is partial. SpaceX has not recovered both Starship stages in one mission, which would be the first return of an orbital launch system. The heat shield, made of hundreds of black hexagonal tiles, is not yet fully reusable either. SpaceX is working on new tile designs that need little or no refurbishment after each flight. For comparison, NASA's Space Shuttle, retired in 2011, was only partly reusable: its external fuel tanks were discarded each flight, and the orbiter itself needed extensive refurbishment before flying again.

The money involved is large. SpaceX has spent more than US$15 billion developing Starship. NASA has provided US$3.2 billion under a contract worth more than US$4 billion that SpaceX won in 2021 to land humans on the moon with Starship as part of the Artemis programme. NASA expects Starship, along with a lander being built by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, to begin crewed lunar flights in 2028, though significant development hurdles remain for both.

For Starship, a central hurdle is demonstrating complex fuel transfers between tanker rockets in orbit. That process is what would let the ship travel beyond Earth orbit to the moon, and it is the next major test to watch.