After the explosion of a booster on Friday, EspaceX On Saturday, the top portion of the upper stage, or spacecraft, of its massive Starship rocket was successfully captured — a triumphant milestone for the company.
SpaceX made this historic capture using its “wands,” mechanical arms attached to a launch tower, at its Starbase, Texas, facility.
Test Flight 15, the most ambitious Starship test to date, marked the first time Elon Musk’s company attempted to catch both the rocket’s booster and upper stage.
Musk posted a video of X inspecting the upper stage craft after completing the capture.
During the first phase of the test flight Friday, SpaceX failed to catch and recover the booster, but instead diverted it to a water landing off the Gulf of Mexico, where it exploded before hitting the water.
The rocket’s upper stage then continued into orbit and completed 14 laps around the Earth before successfully landing on SpaceX’s launch tower, nicknamed Mechazilla.
The Hawaii Department of Transportation imposed a temporary pause on some West Coast flights Friday due to the risk of debris from the flight. Separately, the FAA issued a rare nationwide ground clearance due to telecommunications system outages. (Both of these orders have since been lifted.)
Making Starship a reliable and fully reusable rocket is essential to SpaceX’s ambitions. In the short term, the company needs Starship to send more satellites into orbit to expand its Starlink satellite Internet service, which is currently the company’s profit center.
SpaceX is also expected to use Starship to bring astronauts and cargo from lunar orbit to the Moon’s surface and back for NASA. Musk also has a big vision: using Starship to “colonize Mars” and “make humanity multi-planetary.”
On Friday, on Test Flight 15, SpaceX put another 26 of its new Starlink v3 satellites into orbit, expanding its commercial satellite internet network.
The company’s constellation already included more than 11,000 satellites in low Earth orbit. A Starship rocket can carry up to 60 Starlink v3 satellites, the company said.
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