Elon Musk’s SpaceX has launched another Starship rocket to space, but botched an attempt to bring its booster back to land as president-elect Donald Trump watched from the company’s rocket facilities.
The roughly 122m tall rocket system, designed to land astronauts on the moon and ferry crews to Mars, lifted off at 4pm CT (2200 GMT) from SpaceX’s sprawling rocket development site in Boca Chica, Texas.
Its first stage booster, called Super Heavy, detached from its second stage, Starship, sending the craft into space.
But the booster unexpectedly splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico instead of returning to land, where it was expected to fall into large mechanical arms attached to the tower it launched from. The last-minute diversion to water indicated something went wrong.
A live stream separate from SpaceX’s and hosted by space blogger Everyday Astronaut showed the Super Heavy booster exploding into a massive fireball on the Gulf horizon after splashing down.
Starship last month demonstrated the novel catch-landing method for the first time, achieving a key milestone in its reusable design.
Tuesday’s catch-landing was supposed to be “faster/harder,” Musk had written on social media before the launch.
After the Starship test in October Trump had fixated on the booster’s novel catch-landing technique – “Did you see the way that sucker landed today?,” he said at a rally that day.
The Starship travelled around Earth for a daytime splashdown in the Indian Ocean roughly an hour later.
It reignited one of its onboard engines in space for the first time, an early test of its maneuverability in space that SpaceX had tried but failed to do in past flights.
Nasa chief Bill Nelson, who is expected to leave his role once Trump takes office in January, congratulated SpaceX in a social media post and said Starship’s in-space engine reignition marked “major progress towards orbital flight.”
Nasa is paying SpaceX more than $4bn to land astronauts on the moon via Starship on back-to-back missions later this decade.
Musk envisions launching a fleet of Starships to build a city one day on Mars.
Trump’s attendance at the launch signals a deepening alliance with Musk, who stands to benefit from the Republican’s election victory and will lead the ‘department of government efficiency’ (Doge) under his administration.
The billionaire entrepreneur and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is also expected to wield extraordinary influence to help his companies and secure favourable government treatment.
The US Federal Aviation Administration’s regulation of commercial rocket launches has been a source of frustration for Musk, who has complained that the agency impedes his company’s progress in getting to Mars.
But the FAA’s licence approval of Tuesday’s Starship launch a little over a month after the rocket’s previous flight was its quickest regulatory turnaround yet for SpaceX, as the agency develops new launch-approval processes meant to keep pace with the US space industry’s growth.
Musk on Tuesday listed four core objectives for the test flight: restarting Starship’s space-tailored engine during flight, making a more visible ocean landing during the daytime – past attempts have been at night – putting Starship through more intense heat during reentry, and making the booster landing faster.
“There are thousands of small design changes also being tested,” Musk said.
This was the sixth launch of a fully assembled Starship since 2023. The first three ended up exploding.
With agencies