Starship Reaches Orbit, but Booster Catch Fails and Lands in Gulf of Mexico

The first half of SpaceX's double catch did not go as planned. On Friday, the first-stage booster of the Starship rocket was supposed to return to its Texas launch pad after liftoff and be grabbed by the tower. Instead it was diverted to a point offshore and fell into the Gulf of Mexico in flames. The spacecraft on top kept going and reached orbit in what the company has described as its boldest test yet.

The original goal was to recover every piece of the rocket so it could be reused, something no one in the world has yet achieved. Musk sees that kind of reuse as the route to the fast, consistent launch rates needed to build moon bases and send people to Mars. The booster miss was all the more surprising because SpaceX had already made three booster catches at Starbase, its sprawling site near the U.S.-Mexico border.

Launch commentator Kate Tice put it plainly: "Well, that certainly isn't the news that we had hoped to hear for today." She added that the outcome was in line with the many rigorous safety checks meant to protect the pad. No explanation was offered for what went wrong.

This was also the first attempt to catch the upgraded booster, which stands 236 feet (72 meters) tall and is the production model intended for moon and Mars expeditions. The spacecraft spans 171 feet (52 meters). Stacked together, they make up the world's biggest and most powerful rocket, 407 feet (124 meters) high.

Shortly after reaching orbit, the spacecraft released 26 of the company's most advanced Starlink satellites. It is now due to make 15 laps around the Earth at an altitude of about 170 miles (275 kilometers). Then it will head back toward the launch site for Saturday's attempt. For the first time, a Starship will try to return to the pad from orbit and be plucked from the air by mechanical arms on the launch tower. If everything goes well, the whole flight will last 22 hours.

The history behind it is rough. The spacecraft portion of all 14 previous Starships ended up in the ocean, either by design at the end of a flight or by accident in a stream of flaming wreckage. During the first full-scale test flight in 2023, multiple engines failed to ignite and the tumbling rocket's self-destruct system was triggered. The most recent test, in September, was the first to reach orbit, but SpaceX made no attempt to recover any stage.

The stakes extend beyond Texas. SpaceX plans to begin launching Starships from Florida within a few months and from Louisiana in a few years. Kiko Dontchev, the company's vice president of launch, told a NASA tech summit at Kennedy Space Center last week that scaled-up infrastructure combined with full reusability is "how you go from zero launches to 10 to 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 to 100,000." He noted that the smaller Falcon rockets are still not fully reusable because the second stage is thrown away every flight, whereas with Starship the plan is to catch both stages. Falcons will keep flying astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA from Cape Canaveral and Starlinks from California, and satellites will keep hitching rides on them for now. Musk wants Starships to eventually replace Falcons.

NASA is paying SpaceX billions of dollars to land Artemis astronauts on the moon using Starships, with Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin the other major player. The agency expects to decide a year before the Artemis IV landing, the first by astronauts in more than half a century, whether to use Starship or Blue Moon. Next summer's Artemis III mission will have astronauts practice docking their capsule with a Blue Moon and then a Starship in Earth orbit, setting up a lunar touchdown as early as 2028. After Starship reached orbit, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said on X that the agency looks forward to some of the on-orbit Starlink capability on Artemis III.

Saturday's spacecraft catch is now the thing to watch, along with whatever SpaceX eventually says about why the booster fell short.