STARBASE, Nov 15 — Elon Musk’s SpaceX yesterday pulled off the first-ever “catch” of a spaceship, a technical feat that shows the feasibility of fully reusable rockets and brings affordable spaceflight one step closer to reality.

The Starship emerged from a cloudy sky after surviving the extreme heat of re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, then descended slowly over Starbase before slipping smoothly between mechanical “chopstick arms” above Launch Pad 2.

The success marked a milestone in the space industry’s decades-long pursuit of fully reusable rocket systems — a goal that can drastically reduce mission costs and make more frequent launches possible.

“That was the Holy Grail of spaceflight, plummeting through fire to be snatched out of the air by steel. We caught a Starship and now, everything changes,” SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot said.

Crowds gathered on the Gulf of Mexico beach near Starbase broke into ecstatic cheers as the spaceship came into view, with 1977 soft rock hit “Baby Come Back” serving as the soundtrack of the nerve-wracking final descent on SpaceX’s official livestream.

It was the 15th test flight of the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket system.

The Starship spacecraft that gives the rocket system its name orbited Earth 14 times and deployed 26 satellites for Musk’s Starlink internet constellation during its 22-hour journey.

Until now SpaceX had captured returning booster rockets three times. However, the “catch” of Starship was extraordinarily complex because the spaceship fell much faster and from a much higher altitude compared to boosters.

Musk congratulated the SpaceX team and posted videos of the spaceship hanging between the chopstick arms, saying the vessel “looks great!”

Clayton Swope, an aerospace expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, called the mission a “huge technical achievement and proves the whole idea of Starship as a fully reusable spaceship can work.”

“Let’s see how quickly they can do it again,” he added.

Analyst Kathleen Curlee hailed the achievement but said there was more work to be done.

“What SpaceX needs is multiple repeated successes to prove the capability... to handle sensitive payloads and missions,” said Curlee, of Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

‘Giant swoosh’ 

Starship’s path home had been carefully mapped out to avoid population centres as it travelled over the continent, said senior SpaceX engineer Lars Blackmore.

Starship flew over sparsely inhabited desert areas, wove over towns and then carried out a “giant swoosh manoeuvre” in its final approach, looping around the cities of Texas’ Rio Grande Valley and approaching its landing site from the east.

Some versions of Starship are designed to launch internet satellites and data centres into orbit, while other iterations will be made to ferry people to the Moon and Mars.

US space agency Nasa is expecting Starship to serve as a lunar lander on its Artemis mission. Yesterday, Administrator Jared Isaacman called the spaceship recovery “almost magic.”

“Making more believers by the day... one step closer to (the Moon),” he said on X.

Musk envisions Starship as being the workhorse of “rapidly reusable” rockets, with a goal of hourly launches that could send things like internet satellites and data centres into space.

Refuelling challenge 

Musk, the world’s richest person, has already revolutionised the space sector with the partially reusable Falcon rockets, which regularly launch satellites and carry astronauts to the International Space Station.

But the Starship project has been plagued by delays as SpaceX grapples with novel engineering challenges, including the unsolved problem of transferring fuel to the spaceship while in orbit — a requirement for any journey to the Moon or Mars.

It will also need to further fine-tune the Super Heavy booster, which ran into a technical issue Friday on its descent, forcing a diversion to the Gulf of Mexico. It, too, was supposed to have been caught by the “chopstick arms.”

Following SpaceX’s high-profile stock market debut in June that raised about US$85.7 billion, the company is investing heavily in production and launch capabilities.

During a tour of its million-square-foot (93,000-square-metre) factory at Starbase on Friday, SpaceX officials told journalists it now has the capability to produce a spaceship every two weeks and a booster every four weeks. — AFP