Starship completes 15th test flight with first successful return and tower catch of the spacecraft

SpaceX's Starship spacecraft on Saturday returned from its longest flight in orbit yet to the Texas launch tower it was launched from a day prior, demonstrating the first key recovery of the rocket system's centerpiece vessel in the company's decade-long effort to develop a fully reusable rocket. The uncrewed upper stage, Starship 42, had lifted off on Friday atop its Super Heavy v3 Booster 22 from the company's Starbase facilities on the Gulf coast of south Texas.

The towering two-stage rocket's Super Heavy booster, the rocket's bottom half, carried Starship to space on Friday. That booster failed to make a similar return to the launch pad some ten minutes after liftoff, being diverted instead toward a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico where it exploded before hitting the water, ending SpaceX's plan to recover both parts of the rocket for the first time on one flight.

Fourteen orbits and a satellite deployment

The Starship upper stage's successful return after orbiting Earth 14 times over more than 22 hours marked a key engineering milestone in the whirlwind, multibillion-dollar development of Starship. After deploying 26 Starlink satellites in orbit on Friday night while cruising at an altitude of some 260 kilometres, Starship on Saturday fired one of its engines to begin its atmospheric plunge. It faced blistering heat as its orbital speed of some 27,000 kilometres per hour slowed to a supersonic free-fall in the skies above Starbase.

The spacecraft then reignited three engines to flip itself into a vertical position and steer toward the launch tower, where two mechanical 'chopstick' arms clasped onto the spacecraft as it hovered in place. Company founder Elon Musk later posted a video of himself inspecting the captured upper stage after the catch.

Toward airliner-like spaceflight

SpaceX's dominance in the global launch industry rests on its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which has launched more than 700 times since 2010. That rocket's first stage is reusable, but its second stage, the part that delivers payloads into orbit, is discarded into the ocean after each flight. With Starship, Musk wants a rocket system that can fly to space and back in a manner and tempo akin to commercial airplanes, serving as the future workhorse of the company's satellite business and of ambitions to put humans on the moon and eventually Mars.

Though Saturday's recovery is a key milestone, SpaceX has yet to recover both Starship stages in a single mission. And Starship's heat shield, composed of black hexagonal tiles that protect it from the blazing heat of atmospheric re-entry, is itself not yet fully reusable; the company is trying to engineer new tile designs that will require little to no refurbishment after each mission. The earlier NASA Space Shuttle system, which ferried astronauts to the International Space Station before its 2011 retirement, was only partially reusable: its solid rocket boosters were recovered from the ocean and refurbished for reuse, and the spacecraft itself also needed extensive refurbishment before flying again.