Starship Reaches Orbit Despite Booster Loss, Sets Up Bid to Catch Spacecraft at Pad

The booster was supposed to come home to the tower. On Friday at Starbase, Texas, it did not. After liftoff, the first-stage booster of SpaceX's Starship suffered a malfunction and triggered an automatic abort, and it ended up in the Gulf of Mexico instead of in the mechanical arms waiting at the launch pad. The company had planned to recover the entire rocket in a double catch, and the first half of that plan failed.

The spacecraft on top kept going. The bullet-shaped upper stage continued toward orbit and reached it, in what is SpaceX's boldest test yet. Shortly afterward, Starship prepared to deliver 26 of the company's most advanced Starlink satellites. The flight plan calls for 15 laps around the world at an altitude of about 170 miles.

Then comes the part that remains ahead. Barring further trouble, the spacecraft will steer back toward the pad on Saturday and try to be plucked from the air by mechanical arms on the launch tower. It would be the first time the spacecraft has attempted to return to the pad from orbit. If all goes well, the whole flight will last 22 hours.

The original aim was to retrieve every piece of the rocket so it can be recycled, something not yet achieved anywhere in the world. Elon Musk sees that as the route to the fast, consistent launch rates needed to build moon bases and send people to Mars.

SpaceX has already caught boosters three times at Starbase, its sprawling site near the U.S.-Mexico border. This flight was the first attempt to catch the upgraded booster, which stands 236 feet tall and is the production model for moon and Mars missions. The spacecraft spans 171 feet, and together the two stages make up the world's biggest and most powerful rocket at 407 feet.

The spacecraft's record is mixed. The upper stages 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. On the first full-scale test flight in 2023, multiple engines failed to ignite and the tumbling rocket's self-destruct system was triggered. The last test, in September, was the first to reach orbit, though SpaceX did not try to recover any stage.

The company wants to expand. It plans to begin launching Starships from Florida within a few months and from Louisiana in a few years. Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX's vice president of launch, said last week at a NASA tech summit at Kennedy Space Center that bigger 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 on every flight, whereas with Starship the plan is to catch both stages. Falcons will keep flying from Cape Canaveral, carrying astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA, and from California carrying Starlinks. Satellites will keep riding Falcons for now, and Musk wants Starships eventually to replace them.

NASA has a stake as well. It is paying SpaceX billions of dollars to land Artemis astronauts on the moon with Starships, while Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is the other major contender. NASA expects to decide a year before the Artemis IV landing, the first by astronauts in more than half a century, whether the moonwalkers will reach the surface in Starship or in 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. Saturday's attempt to catch the spacecraft is the next thing to watch.