SpaceX’s Starship reaches orbit, but booster catch aborted

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STARBASE: An unspecified problem forced Elon Musk’s SpaceX on Friday to abort the recovery of the booster of Starship, the world’s biggest and most ...

STARBASE: An unspecified problem forced Elon Musk’s SpaceX on Friday to abort the recovery of the booster of Starship, the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket, but the company hoped it could still pull off a first-ever “catch” of the spaceship itself.

The 124-meter (407-foot) Starship roared into the sky from Starbase in southern Texas on its 15th test flight, but minutes later the landmark mission went awry.

After liftoff and the mid-air separation of the two stages, a problem with the Super Heavy booster forced SpaceX to divert it to an “offshore splashdown”, scuttling what would have been a groundbreaking capture of both components of the rocket.

A fireball erupted as the booster fell into the Gulf of Mexico near the launch site, with a section left sticking out vertically.

“Not sure right now why we weren’t able to bring it back,” SpaceX’s Dan Huot said.

The Starship spacecraft, which gives the rocket system its name, entered Earth’s orbit, where it was expected to circle the globe 14 times before returning on Saturday.

Successful recoveries of both Starship and its booster would mark a milestone in the space industry’s decades-long pursuit of fully reusable rockets that can drastically cut costs and make frequent launches possible.

Clayton Swope, an aerospace expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, called the mission a “mixed bag so far” after the failure to catch the Super Heavy, something SpaceX has done three times before. “At least the Starship made it to orbit, like on the last test flight,” he said.

Some versions of Starship are designed to launch internet satellites and data centers into orbit, while others will carry people to the Moon and Mars.

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