SpaceX‘s giant Starship rocket survived reentry through Earth’s atmosphere on Thursday and splashed down in the Indian Ocean as planned during its fourth test mission after launching from south Texas.
SpaceX staff in Hawthorne cheered as Starlink video showed the towering Super Heavy booster demonstrating a landing over the Gulf of Mexico, and later as the Starship upper stage fired its engines to land.
“Despite loss of many tiles and a damaged flap, Starship made it all the way to a soft landing in the ocean!” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted on social media after the splashdown.
The vehicle is covered with hundreds of small black tiles designed to protect against the extreme heat encountered while diving through Earth’s atmosphere at hypersonic speeds.
Starship, stacked atop its Super Heavy booster, blasted off Thursday morning from the company’s Starbase launch site on the Gulf Coast of Texas in the fourth full test of the world’s largest rocket system.
Designed to be cheaper and more powerful than SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, Starship — standing nearly 400 feet tall — represents the future of the company’s dominant satellite launch and astronaut business. It is due to be used by NASA in the next few years to land the first astronauts on the moon since 1972.
Each Starship rocket has made it farther in its testing objectives than previous tests before failing, either by blowing up or disintegrating in the atmosphere.
Reuters contributed to this article.
