SpaceX launches 15th Starship flight with hopes of achieving first round trip

Detailed summary

SpaceX launched the 15th flight of its Starship spacecraft from Texas on Friday on a mission the company hopes will be the first round-trip rocket voyage to orbit and back to the…

SpaceX launched the 15th flight of its Starship spacecraft from Texas on Friday on a mission the company hopes will be the first round-trip rocket voyage to orbit and back to the very spot where it left Earth, a key test of Elon Musk's effort to build a fully reusable rocket system.

Plans call for Starship's uncrewed upper-stage vessel to re-enter the atmosphere after nearly a day in orbit and return to its launch tower on Saturday for an engine-controlled touchdown assisted by the giant mechanical arms of a pioneering catch-landing mechanism.

SpaceX had intended to use the same return-flight and "chopstick"-arm technology to recover Starship's lower-stage booster rocket shortly after the two parts of the spacecraft separated within minutes of the launch.

But the Super Heavy booster, for reasons not immediately clear, was diverted from its return flight path to a fixed point over the Gulf of Mexico and momentarily hovered in the air before exploding a short distance over the sea surface.

SpaceX mission controllers hoped to have better luck in steering Starship's upper stage back to home base at the end of its flight. The vehicle reached orbit about 27 minutes after launch, SpaceX said.

Bringing the top portion of the spacecraft intact back to the platform where it was launched would mark a breakthrough in the ambitions of Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002, to reduce spaceflight costs by developing a fully recyclable rocket system.

The combined vehicle, consisting of the main Starship cargo-and-crew vessel perched atop its Super Heavy booster rocket and standing 40 stories high, roared off its launch pad from SpaceX's South Texas Starbase complex along the Gulf of Mexico near Brownsville.

The flight marked Starship's 15th test flight since 2023 and the second to carry a batch of operational Starlink satellites to orbit. That makes the mission both a revenue-generating endeavour for SpaceX's satellite-connectivity business and a high-stakes test for a rocket ship still under…

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