SpaceX’s Starship Rocket Successfully Completes 1st Return From Space
The company achieved a key set of ambitious goals on the fourth test flight of a vehicle that is central to Elon Musk’s vision of sending people to Mars.
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This still image taken from a SpaceX broadcast shows the SpaceX Starship launching on its fourth flight test from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, on June 6, 2024.Credit...SpaceX, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Kenneth Chang
June 6, 2024Updated 10:35 a.m. ET
SpaceX’s launch of its giant Starship rocket accomplished a set of ambitious goals on Thursday that Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive, set out before the test flight, its fourth.
The flight, while not a perfect success, offered a sign that Mr. Musk’s vision of building the most powerful rocket ever and making it reusable could again transform a global space launch industry that his company already dominates. It is most likely encouraging for officials at NASA, which will use a version of Starship to take astronauts to the surface of the moon during its Artemis III mission, currently scheduled for late 2026.
Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA, offered his congratulations on X, the social media site that Mr. Musk owns.
“We are another step closer to returning humanity to the Moon through #Artemis—then looking onward to Mars,” he wrote.
The upper-stage Starship vehicle was lifted into space, coasted halfway around the world, survived the searing heat of re-entry and then made a water landing in the Indian Ocean, as planned.
During the descent, cameras on the spacecraft captured the colorful glow of gases heating up below it, At an altitude of above 30 miles, part of one of the steering flaps started falling apart, but it still held together. The view then became obstructed when debris cracked the camera lens.
“The question is how much of the ship is left,” Kate Tice, one of the hosts of the SpaceX broadcast said.
But real-time data continued to stream back, via SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites, to company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., all the way until the altitude was reported at 0 — back to the surface of the Indian Ocean.
A final maneuver to flip Starship to a vertical position just before landing was commanded.
“Despite loss of many tiles and a damaged flap, Starship made it all the way to a soft landing in the ocean!” Mr. Musk wrote on X.
A crowd of onlooking SpaceX employees outside mission control, cheered wildly, seeing the outcome as a validation of the company’s break-it-then-fix-it approach to engineering....
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