SpaceX's Starship successfully returned from orbit to the landing pad

SpaceX's Starship spacecraft successfully returned from a 22-hour flight and, for the first time, landed with the help of the launch tower's giant mechanical arms in Texas. This is an important milestone in the development of a fully reusable rocket system. Reuters reports, UNN relays.

Details

According to the publication, after completing 14 orbits around Earth over 22.5 hours, the spacecraft entered the atmosphere, ignited its engines, and descended vertically toward the launch tower. Its mechanical arms caught Starship and held it above the ground. During the flight, the spacecraft also deployed 26 Starlink satellites into orbit.

After deploying 26 Starlink satellites into orbit on Friday evening during a flight at an altitude of about 260 km, Starship fired one of its engines on Saturday to begin its atmospheric descent while flying east over the Pacific Ocean. It encountered searing heat as its orbital speed of about 17,000 miles per hour slowed to a supersonic free fall in the sky above SpaceX's Starbase facilities on the Gulf Coast in southern Texas. With its aerodynamic flaps folded back, two small fittings near the top of Starship caught on the launch tower's mechanical arms, which closed to seize it, allowing the spacecraft to hang several hundred feet above the ground

Musk and SpaceX engineers began inspecting the spacecraft within several hours of its capture.

Ship 42 looks great - Musk wrote on X, posting photos and video from the launch tower.

According to the publication, SpaceX's dominance in the global launch industry is centered on its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which has launched more than 700 times since 2010. The rocket's first stage is reusable, but the second stage – the part that delivers payloads into orbit

With Starship, Musk wants to create a rocket system that can fly into space and back in the same way and at the same speed as commercial aircraft, with minimal refurbishment between flights. Although Starship's return on Saturday is a key milestone in these efforts, SpaceX has not yet succeeded in returning both Starship stages on a single mission, which would mark the first-ever return of an orbital launch system. And Starship's heat shield, consisting of hundreds of black hexagonal tiles that protect it from searing heat during atmospheric reentry, is itself not yet fully reusable.

SpaceX is trying to develop new tile designs that will require little or no refurbishment after each mission

SpaceX has spent more than $15 billion developing Starship. NASA provided $3.2 billion under a contract worth more than $4 billion, which SpaceX won in 2021, to return humans to the Moon using Starship as part of the space agency's Artemis program.

NASA expects Starship, together with another lunar lander being developed by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, to begin crewed flights to the Moon in 2028, although several challenging development stages remain for both lunar vehicles. For Starship, these milestones include demonstrating complex propellant transfers between Starship tanker rockets in orbit, a critical process that will allow the spacecraft to travel beyond Earth's orbit to the Moon

We remind you

SpaceX will update the design of the Starship rocket by removing one stabilizer. The new version will have three larger and stronger grid fins for better descent.