Starship Reaches Orbit, but Booster Loss Derails SpaceX's Planned Double Catch

On Friday, the first-stage booster of SpaceX's Starship did not return to its Texas launch tower. It was diverted to a point offshore, fell into the Gulf of Mexico, and exploded. That ended the company's plan to catch every piece of the rocket, booster and spacecraft alike, at the pad in a single flight.

The spacecraft carried on regardless. Shortly after reaching orbit, it released 26 of SpaceX's most advanced Starlink satellites. It is now scheduled to make 15 laps around the Earth at an altitude of about 170 miles (275 kilometers), then steer back toward the launch site on Saturday. The flight could last as long as 22 hours, and the return is conditional on no further trouble.

If that return goes to plan, it will be the first time Starship has tried to come back to the pad from orbit, where mechanical arms on the launch tower are meant to pluck it from the air. The goal was to recover every part of the rocket for reuse, something nobody in the world has yet achieved. Elon Musk sees that as the route to the fast, steady launch rates needed to build moon bases and send people to Mars.

The booster loss was a surprise because SpaceX had already caught three boosters at Starbase, its sprawling site near the U.S.–Mexico border. Launch commentator Kate Tice said it was not the news the company had hoped to share, and added that the outcome was consistent with the many rigorous safety checks meant to protect the pad. No explanation was given for what went wrong.

This flight 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 missions. The spacecraft spans 171 feet (52 meters), and stacked together they make a 407-foot (124-meter) rocket, the largest and most powerful in the world.

The record of the spacecraft stage has been rough. All 14 previous Starships ended up in the ocean, either by design at the end of a flight or as flaming wreckage. In the first full-scale test 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.

SpaceX plans to start 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 bigger infrastructure combined with full reusability is how you go from zero launches to 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000 and eventually 100,000. Ahead of Friday's launch he noted that Falcon rockets are still not fully reusable, since the second stage is thrown away on every flight, whereas Starship is meant to have both stages caught. Falcons will keep flying for now, carrying astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA from Cape Canaveral and Starlinks from California, and satellites will still ride them. Musk wants Starships to replace Falcons eventually.

NASA is paying SpaceX billions of dollars to land Artemis astronauts on the moon with Starship. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is the other major contender with its Blue Moon lander. NASA expects to choose between them a year before Artemis IV, the planned landing that would put astronauts on the lunar surface for the first time in more than half a century. Next summer, Artemis III astronauts will practice docking their capsule with Blue Moon and then a Starship in Earth orbit, setting up a touchdown as early as 2028. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said on X after Starship reached orbit that the agency looks forward to some of that on-orbit Starlink capability on Artemis III.

Saturday's attempt to bring the spacecraft back to the tower is now the test to watch.