SpaceX’s bid for Starship double catch thwarted, as booster ends up in ocean

SpaceX launched Starship towards orbit on Friday in its boldest test yet: a 22-hour flight that aimed to capture the entire rocket in a move meant to accelerate moon and Mars travel.

But Elon Musk’s company had to lower its expectations when the first part of the double catch flopped.

The first-stage booster malfunctioned and instead of returning to its Texas pad several minutes after lift-off, it ended up in the Gulf of Mexico after an automatic abort.

Despite the setback, the bullet-shaped spacecraft continued towards orbit. It will steer towards the pad on Saturday for a similar grab, barring further trouble.

It is the first time that the spacecraft will try to return to the pad from orbit, to be plucked in mid-air by mechanical arms secured to the launch tower.

The original goal was to retrieve every single piece of the rocket for the purpose of future recycling, something yet to be achieved anywhere in the world. Musk sees this leading to the kind of fast and consistent launch rates necessary for building moon bases and sending people to Mars.

Once in orbit, Starship will deliver 26 of the company’s most advanced Starlink satellites. The plan is for Starship to complete 15 laps around the world at an altitude of around 170 miles (275km) before heading back to the launch site for Saturday’s grand finale.

SpaceX had already made three booster grabs at the company’s sprawling Starbase near the US-Mexico border.

This was the first attempt to capture the upgraded version that stretches 236 feet (72 metres) – the production model for moon and Mars expeditions.

It will also be the first time the company attempts to catch the spacecraft, which spans 171 feet (52 metres). Together, they form the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket – an astounding 407 feet (124 metres) in height.

The spacecraft portion of the 14 previous Starships ended up in the ocean, either by design at flight’s end or by accident in a stream of flaming wreckage. During the first full-scale test flight in 2023, multiple engines failed to ignite and the tumbling rocket’s self-destruct system was activated.

The last test, in September, was the first to reach orbit, but SpaceX did not try to recover any of the rocket stages.

SpaceX plans to start launching Starships from Florida within a few months and from Louisiana in a few years.

Scaled-up infrastructure, combined with full rocket reusability, is “how you go from zero launches to 10 to 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 to 100,000,” SpaceX’s Kiko Dontchev, vice-president of launch, said at a Nasa tech summit last week at Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre.

SpaceX’s smaller Falcon rockets will continue to fly from Cape Canaveral, carrying astronauts to the International Space Station for Nasa and from California carrying Starlinks. Satellites also will keep hitching Falcon rides for now. Musk wants Starships to eventually replace Falcons.

Falcon rockets “are still not fully reusable. We still throw that second stage away every single flight. Starship, we’re going to catch both the first stage and second stage,” Dontchev said.

Nasa is paying SpaceX billions of dollars to land Artemis astronauts on the moon with Starships. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is the other major player.

Nasa expects to decide a year before the Artemis IV lunar landing – the first by astronauts in more than half a century – whether to get the moonwalkers to the surface with Musk’s Starship or Bezos’ Blue Moon.

During next summer’s Artemis III mission, astronauts will practice docking their capsule with a Blue Moon and then a Starship in orbit around Earth. That will set the stage for an Artemis moon touchdown as early as 2028.