It's the first time that Starship will try to return to the pad from orbit, to be plucked in midair by mechanical arms secured to the launch tower. The loss of the booster meant Elon Musk's company missed out on a double catch.
Instead of returning to its Texas pad following liftoff, the first-stage booster was diverted to a point offshore. Despite the setback, the spacecraft continued on its way. It will steer toward the pad, barring further trouble. The flight could last as long as 22 hours.
The original goal was to retrieve every single piece of the rocket for the purpose of future recycling, something yet to be achieved anywhere in the world. Musk sees this leading to the kind of fast and consistent launch rates necessary for building moon bases and sending people to Mars.
Shortly after reaching orbit, Starship dropped off 26 of the company's most advanced Starlink satellites. The plan is for Starship to complete 15 laps around the world at an altitude of around 275 kilometres before heading back to the launch site for Saturday's grand finale.
SpaceX had already made three booster grabs at the company's sprawling Starbase near the US-Mexico border. That made Friday's miss all the more surprising.
"Well, that certainly isn't the news that we had hoped to hear for today," observed SpaceX launch commentator Kate Tice, adding that it was in line with the many rigorous safety checks to protect the pad. No explanation was provided for what went wrong.
This was the first attempt to capture the upgraded version of the booster that stretches 72 metres — the production model for moon and Mars expeditions. It will also be the first time the company attempts to catch the spacecraft, which spans 52 metres. Together, they form the world's biggest and most powerful rocket.
The spacecraft portion of the 14 previous Starships ended up in the ocean, either by design at flight's end or by accident in a stream of flaming wreckage. During the first full-scale test flight in 2023, multiple engines failed to ignite and the tumbling rocket's self-destruct system was activated.
The last test, in September, was the first to reach orbit, but SpaceX did not try to recover any of the rocket stages.
SpaceX plans to start launching Starships from Florida within a few months and from Louisiana in a few years.
SpaceX's smaller Falcon rockets will continue to fly from Cape Canaveral, carrying astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA and from California carrying Starlinks. Satellites also will keep hitching Falcon rides for now. Musk wants Starships to eventually replace Falcons.
Falcon rockets "are still not fully reusable. We still throw that second stage away every single flight. Starship, we're going to catch both the first stage and second stage," Dontchev said ahead of Friday's launch.
NASA is paying SpaceX billions of dollars to land Artemis astronauts on the moon with Starships. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is the other major player. NASA expects to decide a year before the Artemis IV lunar landing — the first by astronauts in more than half a century — whether to get the moonwalkers to the surface with Musk's Starship or Bezos' Blue Moon.
During next summer's Artemis III mission, astronauts will practice docking their capsule with a Blue Moon and then a Starship in orbit around Earth. That will set the stage for an Artemis moon touchdown as early as 2028.
