All four earlier attempts to land the rocket, designed for travel to the moon and Mars, ended in spectacular crashes.
SpaceX has achieved the first successful touchdown of its prototype Starship rocket during the latest test flight of the next-generation launch vehicle in southern Texas in the United States after four previous landing attempts ended in explosions.
Wednesday’s feat marked a key milestone for the private rocket company of billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk in its development of a reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle to eventually carry astronauts and large cargo payloads to the moon and Mars.
The Starship SN15 blasted off from the SpaceX launch site in Boca Chica, Texas, along the Gulf Coast and reached its planned maximum altitude of 10km (6 miles), then hovered momentarily before flying nose-down under aerodynamic control back towards Earth.
SpaceX’s SN15 Starship prototype comes in for a successful landing for the first time from the company’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas, US [Gene Blevins/Reuters]Manoeuvring itself back into vertical position under rocket thrust as it approached the ground, the 16-story, three-engine vehicle descended to a gentle touchdown on its landing gear.
“We are down, the Starship has landed,” SpaceX principal integration engineer John Insprucker said during live commentary for the flight.
A feed of the landing showed flames continuing to burn at the base of the rocket after the engines cut off, but an automated fire suppression system trained a steady stream of water onto the landing pad, eventually extinguishing the blaze.
The flight came on the 60th anniversary of the first spaceflight by an American astronaut – Alan Shepard’s launch on a 15-minute suborbital mission atop NASA’s Mercury-Redstone rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
‘Starship landing nominal’
Musk declared success on Twitter, posting a terse message in the understated parlance of spaceflight: “Starship landing nominal!”
Starship landing nominal!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 5, 2021
Four previous test flights of Starship prototypes – SN8 in December, SN9 in February and SN10 and SN11 in March – all blasted off successfully but blew to pieces.
The complete Starship rocket, which will stand 120 metres (394 feet) tall when mated with its super-heavy first-stage booster, is SpaceX’s next-generation launch vehicle at the centre of Musk’s ambitions to make human space travel more affordable and routine.
SpaceX conceived the Starship as a versatile, fully reusable craft that can carry 100 metric tonnes and as many as 100 passengers
NASA recently picked SpaceX to develop a moon-landing system for astronauts with Starship. The company also envisions the stainless steel behemoth as eventually being capable of reducing travel times across Earth with hypersonic, point-to-point trips.
A first orbital Starship flight is planned for year’s end. Musk has said he intends to fly Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa around the moon with the Starship in 2023
