SpaceX pulls off first Starship recovery from orbit in spectacular fashion

After a 22-hour stay in space, a SpaceX Starship rocket plunged back to Earth Saturday, enduring the blazing heat of reentry while homing in on its Texas Gulf Coast launch site, flipping vertical at the last moment and settling into the grasp of two huge mechanical arms on its launch gantry.

Throngs of SpaceX employees gathered nearby cheered and applauded as the rocket restarted three of its six methane-fueled Raptor engines to flip upright, rapidly slowing to a near hover as the robot arms moved in for a mechanical embrace, catching the rocket a moment before engine shutdown.

"This is so incredible to see!" said SpaceX commentator Jessie Anderson. "One of the most incredible and historic engineering feats of all time has just happened right in front of our eyes. Congratulations to our teammates at SpaceX, and to everyone who supported the Starship program."

It was the first such recovery of a Starship from orbit — previous test flights ended with planned ocean splashdowns — marking a major milestone in SpaceX's drive to develop the first fully reusable orbit-class rocket, a vehicle company founder Elon Musk says will dramatically lower the cost of launching payloads to Earth orbit, the moon and, eventually, Mars.

The Starship was launched atop a Super Heavy booster Friday using the same pad at SpaceX's Starbase facility on the Texas coast. Standing 407 feet tall, the two-stage rocket is the most powerful launcher ever built, generating some 16 million pounds of thrust at liftoff from 33 first-stage Raptor engines.

After propelling the Starship upper stage out of the lower atmosphere, the Super Heavy first stage attempted its own return to the launch site for capture by the gantry's mechanical arms.

Going into the giant rocket's 15th test flight, SpaceX had successfully recovered the first-stage boosters used in three previous launches. But the Super Heavy launched Friday was diverted to an offshore splashdown because of a guidance problem. The vehicle ran out of fuel and exploded moments before hitting the water.

While a disappointment to the SpaceX team, Musk said in a posting on the social media platform X the problem was a "slight underperformance of engines," adding that "these early ships and boosters are already outdated by improved designs in production or on the test stand."

"This booster loss does not change our timeline to reach high volume, fully reusable Starship flights," he said.

The Starship upper stage did not disappoint.

Beaming down crystal-clear views from cameras mounted on its steering fins, the spacecraft's belly, covered in heat-shield tiles, glowed red as the ship heated up in a fireball of atmospheric friction.

Crossing the Baja Peninsula and then northern Mexico, the big rocket rapidly descended before flying just north of the launch site, banking and dropping belly first out of low clouds, restarting its engines to flip upright and then falling at an angle toward the gantry, slowing to a near standstill as the arms closed around it.

"The room behind me going absolutely insane," SpaceX commentator Dan Huot said from the mission control center. "These people have done so much to earn this. ... I mean, that was the missing link. That was the holy grail of spaceflight, plummeting through fire to be snatched out of the air by steel. We caught a Starship, and now everything changes."

But SpaceX will need to successfully launch and recover a large number of Super Heavy-Starships to demonstrate the statistical reliability needed for crewed flights. And the company will need to demonstrate its ability to autonomously refuel Starships in Earth orbit and keep their propellants from boiling away in the space environment.

While the system is designed to be fully reusable, the Starship upper stage uses most of its propellant getting into Earth orbit. NASA wants to use a variant of the Starship to carry astronauts to the lunar surface in 2028 and multiple Super Heavy-tanker flights will be needed to refuel the lander in Earth orbit before it can head for the moon.

SpaceX plans to begin orbital fueling tests in the next several Super Heavy-Starship flights. But the rocket's development has taken longer than initially expected and the space agency is now hedging its bets, saying it's open to using Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 2 lander depending on which spacecraft is ready in time.