Written by Joey Roulette
(Reuters) – Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched its massive Starship rocket into space from Texas on Tuesday, improving the spacecraft’s capabilities but scrambling to return its booster to Earth as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump watched from the company’s rocket launch pad.
The nearly 400-foot-tall (122-meter-tall) rocket system, designed to house astronauts on the moon and crew for missions to Mars, lifted off at 4 pm CT (2200 GMT) from SpaceX’s Boca Chica rocket development facility , Texas.
The rocket’s 233-foot-tall first-stage booster, called the Super Heavy, lifted off from its second stage, the Starship, about 40 miles (62 km) high, sending the ship into space.
The Super Heavy splashed down unexpectedly in the Gulf of Mexico instead of returning to land, where it was expected to fall into the giant arms attached to the tower it launched from. A last-minute diversion of water indicated that something had gone wrong.
A separate live broadcast by SpaceX and hosted by space blogger Everyday Astronaut showed the Super Heavy booster exploding into a giant fireball over the Gulf horizon after splashing down.
Starship last month demonstrated a novel fishing method for the first time, reaching a milestone in its reusable design. Tuesday’s catch was supposed to be “fast/hard,” Musk had written on social media before the launch.
After the Oct. 14 Starship test, Trump marveled, preparing a novel booster shot — “Did you see how that kid came in today?,” he said at a rally that day.
The rest of the work seemed successful.
In space, the Starship orbited Earth to land in the Indian Ocean about an hour later. It fired one of its engines back into space for the first time, an early test of its spaceflight that SpaceX had tried but failed to do on previous flights.
NASA CEO Bill Nelson, who is expected to leave his role when Trump takes office in January, congratulated SpaceX in a post on X and said the Starship engine’s dominance in space marked “a major advance in orbital flight.”
Trump’s arrival marks the deepening of the alliance with Musk, who stands to benefit from Trump’s election victory. The billionaire entrepreneur and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla (NASDAQ:
The world’s richest man, Musk was a prominent supporter of Trump’s presidential campaign, appearing with him at rallies and backing him with an estimated $119 million in political endorsements.
“I’m headed to the Great State of Texas to watch the launch of the greatest thing ever lifted, not just into space, but off the ground,” Trump wrote on social media, wishing Musk the best of luck with the launch. .
Trump on November 13 nominated Musk as co-leader of a new government efficiency project the SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO said would rid the federal government of wasteful spending and what he called burdensome regulations.
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 is hindering his company’s progress in reaching Mars.
But the FAA’s approval of Tuesday’s Starship launch license, a little more than a month after the previous rocket’s flight, was the fastest regulatory change yet for SpaceX, as the agency develops new launch authorization procedures aimed at keeping up with the growth of the U.S. space industry.
On Tuesday, Musk outlined four key goals for the test flight: restarting the Starship’s space-engineered engine during flight, making the ocean more visible during the day — previous efforts were at night — putting the Starship under intense heat during re-entry, and making the booster land faster.
“There are thousands of small design changes that are also being tested,” Musk said.
SpaceX has seen rapid progress in Starship development during Trump’s second term. The administration’s space agenda is expected to give NASA’s Artemis program, which is due to return astronauts to the moon, to focus more on the more ambitious goal of landing humans on Mars, Musk’s biggest space ambition.
“We just flew 400 Falcon launches, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we flew 400 Starship launches in the next four years,” SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said at the Baron Investment Conference in New York last week, referring to in the company’s company. workhorse rocket.
