SpaceX Starship returns to landing pad from orbit, acing test for reusable rockets

STARBASE, Texas: SpaceX's Starship spacecraft on Saturday (Nov 15) 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, a catch that is essential to the company's decade-long effort to develop a fully reusable rocket.

The 52m Starship fell out of thick clouds over SpaceX's Starbase launch site, 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.

"That was the missing link, the holy grail of spaceflight," SpaceX mission commentator Dan Huot said of the ship catch.

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.

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But the Starship upper stage's successful return after orbiting Earth 14 times for 22.5 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 Friday night while cruising some 260km in altitude, Starship on Saturday fired one of its engines to begin an atmospheric plunge while flying eastward over the Pacific Ocean.

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.

With its aerodynamic fins folded back, two small fittings near the top of Starship hooked onto the launch tower's mechanical arms that had closed in to grasp it, allowing the vessel to hang a few hundred feet off the ground.

Musk and SpaceX engineers began inspecting the ship within hours of its catch.

"Ship 42 looks great!" Musk wrote on X, posting photos and videos from the launch tower.