SpaceX’s Starship returns to launch pad from orbit in victory for company

Although booster exploded, company caught upper stage for first time in campaign to make megarocket reusable

SpaceX’s megarocket Starship returned to its Texas launch tower on Saturday, a milestone in the company’s efforts to make the craft suitable for human spaceflight.

The 171ft (52-meter) bullet-shaped upper stage descended into the clutch of the tower’s mechanical arms, ending a 22hr mission where the craft orbited Earth 14 times.

Starship’s 15th test flight was envisioned as a historic double-catch mission, where all parts of the rocket would be returned intact to the launch site, rather than recovered from the sea as with some previous test flights.

The hulking spacecraft is composed of two parts: a lower booster stage called Super Heavy, whose Raptor engines powered the orbital ascent, and an upper stage also called Starship.

Those double-catch ambitions were dashed on Friday, when the booster diverted a few minutes after takeoff and exploded in the Gulf of Mexico.

The guidance, navigation and control (GNC) system triggered the no-go.

“It was doing what it was supposed to do. Basically, it detected that the booster was not in the place it was supposed to be to proceed with a catch,” SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said early on Saturday.

This week’s test flight was still a victory for SpaceX, marking the first time that the company caught its upper stage.

The feat comes as the 2028 date nears for Nasa’s plan to return humans to the lunar surface. The agency has contracted SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin for the mission.

SpaceX has plans to ramp up its Starship test flights to a weekly, then twice-weekly cadence, chief executive Elon Musk said on a recent earnings call. He has sought to make Starship rapidly reusable so that it can land and take off much like standard airplanes.

Beyond another Moon landing, Musk has also pushed a plan of carrying humans to Mars.