SpaceX has made an incredible catch of its Super Heavy Booster during the seventh test flight of its Starship rocket, but has lost the vehicle. Launched at 5:37 p.m. ET today, Thursday January 16, from SpaceX’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas, this is only the second time that the enormous booster of the Starship has been caught, as part of SpaceX’s aim to create a reusable heavy lift vehicle.
However, the upper stage of the Starship — the part which should travel into orbit and deploy payloads — seemed to have issues with its engines during its ascent, and communications with it were lost around 10 minutes after launch, around the time of main engine cut-off.
“It successfully separated, we did see that hot staging maneuver and we did see all six of Ship’s engines on the way uphill during its ascent, but as we were getting to the end of that ascent and burn we saw engines dropping out on telemetry, and we have since lost contact with the Ship,” said SpaceX commentator Dan Huot. “At this point, we are assuming that the Ship has been lost.”
The Starship undertaking the test flight today was a brand new vehicle, with various changes made to the hardware compared to previous test flights, which brings a range of risks.
“We do believe we have lost the ship during its ascent phase,” said Kate Tice, senior quality engineering manager at SpaceX. “But this was a new version of Starship, and it was intentionally designed and flown in order to test the envelope, as we have done with every one of these test flights — the key word there being ‘test’. And really trying to understand the boundaries and the maximums for the ability of this vehicle to fly, and understand where those boundaries are. We always knew that excitement was guaranteed today — success, not guaranteed.”
However, the SpaceX team still has something to celebrate, as the booster, or first stage, was successfully caught at the Boca Chica facility. The separation of booster and ship was successful, and booster came back in to the giant robot arms of the tower, named Mechazilla.
Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster! pic.twitter.com/aq91TloYzY
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 16, 2025
Even with the loss of the Starship, the SpaceX team was positive they would continue development: “It was great to see booster come down, but we are obviously bummed out about ship,” said Huot. “We obvisouly need to go through all the data. It’s going to take some time. In the next hours or days we’re going to figure out exactly what happened, come back, fly the next one, get even farther… We’ll figure out what ended our day today and make sure it doesn’t end our day tomorrow.”
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.