SpaceX Starship returns to landing pad from orbit

Detailed summary

SpaceX’s Starship has returned to Earth from orbit and has - for the first time - been caught by giant mechanical arms on the launch tower in Texas.

SpaceX's Starship spacecraft has returned from a 22-hour voyage in orbit and descended for the first time into the grasp ‌of giant mechanical arms at the Texas tower it was launched from a day earlier.

The catch is essential to the company's decade-long effort ‌to develop a fully reusable rocket.

Standing around 120 metres tall, Starship fell out of thick clouds over SpaceX's Starbase launch site on Saturday, reignited engines to flip itself vertical and slowly descended into the tower's "Mechazilla" arms, engines still roaring.

Charred from the blazing heat of its return from space, the ship shut down its engines and hung still after the rocket system's longest mission yet.

The towering two-stage rocket's Super Heavy booster - the rocket's bottom half - carried Starship ‌to space on ‌Friday, 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 lucrative Starlink satellite business, as well as ambitions to put data centres in orbit, return humans to ⁠the moon and, eventually, settle on Mars.

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

It faced blistering ​heat as its ‌orbital speed of some 17,000 miles per hour slowed to a supersonic free-fall in the skies above SpaceX's Starbase facilities on the ​Gulf Coast of south Texas.

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