SpaceX’s Starship aces first return to Texas

Detailed summary

The Starship upper stage’s successful return after orbiting Earth 14 times for over 22 hours marked a key engineering milestone in its development. Read more at straitstimes.com.

SpaceX Starship 42 returns from orbit to the launch pad on the 15th test flight from the SpaceX launch complex in Starbase, Texas, US, on Nov 14.

STARBASE, Texas - SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft on Nov 14 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 centrepiece vessel in the company’s decade-long effort to develop a fully reusable rocket.

The towering two-stage rocket’s Super Heavy booster - the rocket’s bottom half - carried Starship to space on Nov 13, lifting off from SpaceX’s Starbase, Texas, facilities. That booster had failed to make a similar return to the launch pad some 10 minutes after liftoff, nixing SpaceX’s plan to recover both parts of the rocket for the first time.

But the Starship upper stage’s successful return after orbiting Earth 14 times for over 22 hours marked a key engineering milestone in the whirlwind, multibillion-dollar development of Starship, which billionaire Elon Musk sees as the future workhorse for SpaceX’s satellite business and ambitions to put humans on the moon and eventually Mars.

After deploying 26 Starlink satellites in orbit Nov 13 night while cruising some 260km in altitude, Starship on Nov 14 fired one of its engines to begin an atmospheric plunge.

It faced blistering heat as its orbital speed of some 27,359kmh slowed to a supersonic free-fall in the skies above SpaceX’s Starbase facilities on the Gulf coast of south Texas.

The spacecraft then reignited three engines to flip itself in a vertical position and steer itself toward the launch tower, where two mechanical “chopstick” arms clasped onto the spacecraft as it hovered in place.

SpaceX’s dominance in the global launch industry is centred on its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which has launched over 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…

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