The fourth test flight of the largest and most powerful rocket ever built is in the books, and what a dramatic and nerve-wracking journey it was for SpaceX.
SpaceX launched its Starship megarocket for the fourth time ever today (June 6) at 8:50 a.m. EDT (1250 GMT), sending the 400-foot-tall vehicle aloft from its starbase near Boca Chica Beach in South Texas atop a thundering column of fire.
There were two main objectives today: to bring down Starship’s first stage booster, known as Super Heavy, for a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico, and to achieve a controlled reentry of the 50-meter upper stage, called Starship or simply ship. Both the Super Heavy booster and its ship appeared to make their water landings, causing spectators at SpaceX mission control at Starbase to erupt in loud cheers.
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“This whole building went absolutely insane,” SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot said during live commentary from the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. “When we saw the booster hit the water, I mean, wow.”
Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, was thrilled.
“Successful soft landing of the Starship Super Heavy rocket booster!” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter) after the splashdown.
The Starship Ship vehicle, meanwhile, appeared to have suffered its landing burn, despite one of its flaps suffering obvious burn-through damage during the descent. Live camera footage showed the lid’s heat shield burning away, covering the camera in dirt and eventually cracking the lens.
Still, the camera came back despite several signal drops, proving each time that Starship was still alive. Upon landing, the ship appeared to turn around and perform its landing burn as planned, SpaceX said.
“Despite the loss of many tiles and a damaged flap, Starship has achieved a soft landing in the ocean!” Elon Musk later wrote about X. “Congratulations SpaceX team on an epic achievement!!
The crowd, as you would expect, went wild.
“It was so loud in here,” said Kate Tice, senior manager of quality systems at SpaceX, during live commentary. “I probably haven’t heard the crowd get this rowdy since Flight One.”
Jessie Anderson of Tice, Huot and SpaceX celebrated the spaceship landing by roasting a marshmallow with a lighter in the shape of a spaceship.
Related: Relive SpaceX Starship’s third flight test in breathtaking photos
Starship sees the fully reusable Starship as a revolutionary advance in space travel, a step that could finally make human settlement of the moon and Mars economically feasible.
The vehicle is designed with Mars in mind: its next-generation Raptor engines (33 for Super Heavy and six for Ship) burn liquid oxygen and liquid methane, both of which could come from the Red Planet.
However, the moon will likely be Starship’s first distant stop. NASA selected the spacecraft as the first crewed lander for its Artemis lunar exploration program, which aims to establish a research base in the ice-rich Antarctic region by the late 2020s. The current architecture calls for Starship to land NASA astronauts on the moon for the first time in September 2026, during the Artemis 3 mission.
Starship will need to conduct many more test flights before it’s ready for that milestone mission, but the stainless steel spacecraft is off to a good start, making significant progress in each of its four launches so far.
Starship’s two stages could not be separated during its debut flight, which took place in April 2023. That mission ended with a controlled explosion of the tumbling vehicle just four minutes after takeoff. (And that launch destroyed a crater beneath Starbase’s orbital launch pad, prompting SpaceX to install a gargoyle metal plate as a heat-dissipating reinforcement.)
Flight 2, in November 2023, achieved phase separation but still ended prematurely; both Ship and Super Heavy were reduced to swirling bits in the Earth’s atmosphere eight minutes after launch.
Starship made a big leap with Flight 3, which launched on March 14 this year. The phase separation occurred in time and Super Heavy reached within 500 meters of the Gulf of Mexico wave crests before breaking up. The ship, meanwhile, reached an orbital velocity and flew for nearly 50 minutes, eventually succumbing to intense frictional heating as it re-entered our atmosphere after an uncontrollable roll due to the loss of its reaction control system, SpaceX said.
Flight 4 saw even more improvement, as the Super Heavy reached the water safely while the ship appeared to maintain roll control throughout the flight.
During launch, the Super Heavy booster appeared to fire 32 of its 33 Raptor engines during takeoff, with one engine clearly failing in video and telemetry. When the Super Heavy fired its 13-engine landing burner, only 12 engines fired, but the booster still appeared to make its “soft landing,” SpaceX said.
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If you missed today’s launch, don’t worry: there will likely be many more spaceship launches in the near future. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said the company plans to launch six test flights of the mega rocket in 2024, which would mean another four launches over the next six months.
The timeline isn’t entirely up to SpaceX, of course; regulators like the Federal Aviation Administration have a say. But true to its fast-evolving ways of working, SpaceX has already prepared for the upcoming Starship launches. For example, the Flight 5 vehicle was tested early last month.