On October 13th 2024, SpaceX caught a 20-storey booster rocket returning from the edge of space. An hour later, they accurately mock-landed the second-stage spaceship in the Indian Ocean. This was only the fifth test flight of a Starship combo.
Spaceflight has long ago passed the Wright Brothers stage of innovation — this is more like the first flight of a prototype jet airliner.
I know, Elon Musk is a gigantic knobber, a perpetual teenage edgelord who has become a caricature of a billionaire power fantasy. Aviation seems to attract weirdoes — Howard Hughes was the Elon Musk of his own era. Like Hughes, the achievements of SpaceX will long outlast Musk’s toxic personality.
So let’s get back to this week’s landmark: they caught a rocket.
The entire Starship stack is 121 metres tall, and the Super Heavy booster makes up 71m of that — about 23 storeys. That’s an average size block of flats, but now imagine that block of flats falling from 96 kilometres up.
Super Heavy reached supersonic speed as it fell and it didn’t snap in half. It re-lit 13 of its 33 engines to slow to a dead stop with pin point accuracy, then it used three of them to scooch sideways into the waiting arms of its launch tower.
No one has ever attempted anything like this before, let alone succeeded. SpaceX has landed its Falcon 9 rocket more than 350 times now, but those are about half the size of Super Heavy. All the same, it’s now the most reliable space launch hardware ever built, and changing the economics of spaceflight.
Next time, catch two rockets
Every Starship test flight has hit a milestone. For the first flight, it was just getting the stack off the launch pad. For the second, it was getting a Starship into space. For the third, it was achieving orbital velocity and in-space testing. The fourth flight saw a successful mock-landing of Super Heavy at sea and a fiery mock-landing of the Starship.
The next step would be to bring both rockets back to the launch site in Boca Chica, Texas. A second launch tower now stands ready to catch Starship beside Super Heavy. If it’s anything like Falcon 9, some of those flights will fail, and the system will be tweaked each time until there’s a stable and reliable design.
There were small fires after the catch this time, as propellant burned off around the base of the Super Heavy. There was also minor damage to the booster exterior and Starship’s heat shield showed some weaknesses. Catching a Starship that has just been through a 1,400°C re-entry will surely have its own complications.
Fly to survive
They’ll have to start re-using Super Heavies and Starships before they can declare the system fully resuable. As with Falcon 9, it can start to deliver cargo as soon as it can reach orbit reliably. Starship can carry up to 100 tonnes so long as the payload arrives, the mission is a success.
Flying repeatedly until everything worked is how Falcon 9 and the Dragon cargo capsule proved themselves. By the time SpaceX put people into the capsule, the rocket and capsule had a solid track record. No longer was every astronaut relying on engineers’ promises for a vehicles that had never flown before.
Falcon 9 requires weeks to be refurbished between flights, but the aim for Starship is to relaunch within one hour. This booster won’t fly again but the Raptor engines may well show up in other boosters.
Launch, catch, repeat, and refuel
Getting in and out of space reliably is only the beginning for Starship. There’s a lot to be done in space to make it ready for shipping astronauts and cargo to the Moon or Mars.
Getting to orbit and back uses up most of Starship’s fuel, so SpaceX needs to build a tanker version. This will deliver fuel to other Starships or top-up an orbiting fuel depot, ready for future launches.
Despite what you might have seen in Armageddon, this is another first for spaceflight. Liquids behave very differently in zero-gravity and it might take a few goes to get this right. Docking two Starships in orbit to refuel will also be a challenge.
Then there’s life support for the human-rated variants, cargo doors and delivery systems for putting satellites in orbit. They’ll want a robotic arm for delivering components to the ISS and proposed commercial space stations.
SpaceX needs to deliver a Moon-landing variant of Starship for NASA’s Artemis 3 mission in 2026. That will need landing legs, plus a crane and elevator to get the crew from their accommodation, 30m above the fuel tanks. NASA also has a lot of work to do to hit that deadline, so SpaceX might not be sweating it too much.
The first — unmanned — Starship to Mars is now scheduled for the launch window of 2028. Musk hasn’t said if that will be an orbital return flight, or an attempt to land and test vital hardware like a fuel generator to bring it home.
Every SpaceX and Starship test flight so far has been a mix of success and failure, but Flight 5 felt like almost everything was in the success column. It looks like science fiction made into reality, and I can’t wait to see what Flight 6 brings.