New Delhi: Early on Wednesday, SpaceX, the company owned by billionaire Elon Musk, successfully completed its sixth test launch of its massive Starship rocket. It was unable to replicate the "booster catch," though.
At 5:00 p.m. EST (3.30 IST), the massive 30-foot-wide, 397-foot-tall rocket took off from SpaceX's Starbase facility near Boca Chica Beach in South Texas, where US President-elect Donald Trump was also in attendance.
The fifth test flight, last month, made a historical catch of the booster with the “chopstick arms”. However, during the sixth flight, the catch was called off just four minutes into the test flight for unspecified reasons. It was directed to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
"We tripped a commit criteria," SpaceX's Dan Huot said during the webcast.
Meanwhile, SpaceX announced that for the first time “Starship successfully ignited one of its Raptor engines while in space”. It also carried the first-ever Starship payload -- a plush banana onboard Ship, which served as a zero-gravity indicator.
Igniting Raptor engines in space shows that the Starship can perform the necessary manoeuvres needed to return to Earth safely during orbital missions.
Flight 6 also tested modifications to Starship's heat shield, which protects the vehicle during reentry to Earth's atmosphere, and “intentionally flew at a higher angle of attack in the final phase of descent, purposefully stressing the limits of flap control to gain data on future landing profiles", SpaceX said.
The landing burn of the booster was smooth and flawless, and it did not appear to explode after splashdown.
“Successful ocean landing of Starship! We will do one more ocean landing of the ship. If that goes well, then SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower,” Musk said in a post on X.
Starship and heavy booster -- the world's biggest and most powerful rocket system -- will launch the moon lander for NASA's Artemis 3 mission that aims to land astronauts on the Moon by 2026.