Starship returns from orbit and lands in launch tower's arms in a first

SpaceX's Starship came home Saturday and got plucked out of the air by the giant mechanical arms of its launch tower — the first time a Starship flying back from space has been caught. The stainless steel spacecraft lowered itself upright at the same pad it left 22 hours earlier. The catch was the finale Elon Musk's team wanted, but not a clean sweep: the first-stage booster exploded shortly after Friday's liftoff from Texas, leaving SpaceX short of a double catch.

The 407-foot (124-meter) rocket blasted off late Friday afternoon from SpaceX's Starbase complex near the U.S.-Mexican border. The upper stage separated cleanly, reached orbit and released 26 advanced Starlink satellites, then circled 165 miles (265 kilometers) up for 14 laps around Earth — far more than the one or two laps of the previous mission. It was SpaceX's 15th flight of a full-scale Starship since 2023 and only its second trip to orbit. SpaceX reported that everything on the spacecraft, including its vital heat shield, appeared to work well.

The booster had a rougher ride. SpaceX's Kate Tice said its engines stopped firing too soon on the way down; the guidance system sensed it was out of position and automatically triggered the watery detour and self-destruction. Wreckage sat in the Gulf of Mexico, cordoned off by buoys, while engineers investigate the cause. The miss stung less because SpaceX had already nailed three previous booster catches, validating the technique.

SpaceX commentator Dan Huot shouted through the webcast as the ship hung above the ground: “Can you believe it? Look at her! Baby, she's back!” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman weighed in on X, calling it “almost magic” and adding, “Making more believers by the day.”

NASA is paying billions for Starship to land Artemis astronauts on the moon later this decade and help build a permanent lunar base. SpaceX expects to start launching Starships from Florida's Kennedy Space Center within the next few months, the starting point for NASA's next Artemis mission — an Earth-orbit lunar lander practice run that skips the moon. Artemis III's four astronauts will try to dock with both Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon, with the two companies taking turns delivering crews to the lunar surface. NASA is targeting as soon as 2028 for Artemis IV, the first moon landing since the Apollo era.