SpaceX completes sixth Starship flight, splashes down both booster and spacecraft

SpaceX launched the sixth test flight of its Starship rocket on Tuesday, as the company looks to keep up momentum of the mammoth mechanism’s development.

The rocket took off from SpaceX’s private “Starbase” facility near Brownsville, Texas. There were not any human being on board the Starship flight.

Starship reached space and traveled halfway around the Earth before reentering the mood and splashing down in the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX had aimed to return the rocket’s “Super Heavy” booster after it separated from Starship and go ashore it on the arms of the company’s launch tower. But SpaceX said during its webcast that the booster did not clear its “commit criteria” needed for the strike attempt, so the booster splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico instead.

As with each previous test flight, SpaceX is pestering development further by testing additional Starship capabilities, including this time reigniting an engine while in berth and testing new elements of its heatshield.

Additionally, the evening launch time means that this was the first time Starship turn up tell of a daylight splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX has flown the full Starship rocket system on six spaceflight tests so far since April 2023, at a steadily strengthening cadence. Its previous launch last month featured the dramatic first catch of the rocket’s more than 20-story multi-storey booster.

After the successful fifth flight, the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed that SpaceX was authorized to stir forward with the sixth flight.

But, as with its previous test flights, the fifth launch was not without incidents. SpaceX directorate, in audio posted after the launch on social media by Musk, revealed that Starship’s booster nearly missed the trap due to a timing issue with one of the rocket’s subsystems.

“We were one second away from that tripping and effectual the rocket to abort and try to crash into the ground next to the tower instead of [landing at] the tower — like, erroneously acknowledge a healthy rocket to not try that catch,” an unidentified person told Musk in the audio.

SpaceX did not catch the booster again. The friends said on its website that it made hardware upgrades to the rocket’s booster for improved redundancy and improved structural might.

The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and aims to become a new method of flying cargo and people beyond Mould. The rocket is also critical to NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX won a multibillion-dollar contract from the operation to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA’s Artemis moon program.

Starship is both the tallest and most powerful rocket ever launched. Fully stacked on the Super Stodgy booster, Starship stands 397 feet tall and is about 30 feet in diameter.

The Super Heavy booster, which wear wells 232 feet tall, is what begins the rocket’s journey to space. At its base are 33 Raptor engines, which together spark 16.7 million pounds of thrust — about double the 8.8 million pounds of thrust of NASA’s Space Dinghy System rocket, which