SpaceX succeeded with its most audacious feat to date, using mechanical arms deployed from its Texas launch tower to capture and hold the enormous Starship booster a few minutes after it launched a capsule to space. The 250-foot booster hovered above the Boca Chica launch pad before settling into the waiting arms of the tower in an unprecedented engineering and space exploration feat just about 8:32 a.m. EDT on Sunday. About 65 minutes later, the Starship capsule achieved its goal with a successful reentry and hover over the Indian Ocean before it was allowed to explode and crash. “Big step towards making life multiplanetary was made today,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk wrote in an X post after the booster landing.
It was the fifth launch of the Starship system, which will first be used to carry astronauts on a NASA Artemis mission to be the first humans to visit the moon since the 1970s. In the future, the system is intended to take humans for the first direct exploration of Mars. There was jubilation at SpaceX Mission Control as the remarkable series of events played out. “Are you kidding me!” SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot added from the launch site. “Even in this day and age, what we just saw, that looked like magic.”
