“Are you kidding me?” SpaceX communications manager Dan Huot said on the company’s webcast.
“What we just saw, that looked like magic,” Huot added.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated SpaceX in a post on social media.
“As we prepare to go back to the Moon under Artemis, continued testing will prepare us for the bold missions that lie ahead,” Nelson wrote.
Starship separated and continued on to space, traveling halfway around the Earth before reentering the atmosphere and splashing down in the Indian Ocean as intended to complete the test.
There were no people on board the fifth Starship flight. The company’s leadership has said SpaceX expects to fly hundreds of Starship missions before the rocket launches with any crew.
The full Starship system has flown four spaceflight tests previously, with launches in April and November of last year, as well as this March and June. Each of the test flights have achieved more milestones than the last.
SpaceX emphasizes that it tries to build “on what we’ve learned from previous flights” in its approach to developing the massive rocket.
The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and aims to become a new method of flying cargo and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also critical to NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX won a multibillion-dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA’s Artemis moon program.
The Federal Aviation Administration issued SpaceX with a license to launch Starship’s fifth flight on Saturday, sooner than the regulator previously estimated. But the company wanted to launch the fifth flight earlier than October, leading both SpaceX and Musk to be vocally critical of the FAA, saying that “superfluous environmental analysis” was holding up the process.
While the FAA and partner agencies at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service conducted assessments more quickly than anticipated, SpaceX has also had to pay fines to environmental regulators regarding unauthorized water discharges at its Texas launch site.
Goals for fifth flight
With the booster catch, SpaceX has surpassed the fourth test flight’s milestones.
The company completed its goal of returning the booster back to the launch site and used the “chopstick” arms on the tower to catch the vehicle. The company sees the ambitious catch approach as critical to its goal of making the rocket fully reusable.
“SpaceX engineers have spent years preparing and months testing for the booster catch attempt, with technicians pouring tens of thousands of hours into building the infrastructure to maximize our chances for success,” the company wrote on its website.
