SpaceX has shared some slow-motion footage of its Starship spacecraft making a controlled landing in the Indian Ocean just over an hour after it launched from SpaceX’s Starbase site near Boca Chica in southern Texas on Tuesday.
The Elon Musk-led spaceflight company shared two videos of the landing, with one of them tracking the Starship as it descended to make a controlled, soft landing on the water.
“View of Starship landing burn and splashdown on Flight 10, made possible by SpaceX’s recovery team,” it wrote in a post on X. “Starship made it through reentry with intentionally missing tiles, completed maneuvers to intentionally stress its flaps, had visible damage to its aft skirt and flaps, and still executed a flip and landing burn that placed it approximately 3 meters from its targeted splashdown point.”
Musk later revealed that at least one of the videos was captured by a camera connected to a Starlink terminal placed in a wading pool.
Starship’s 10th test flight, which took place on Tuesday after scrubbed launches on Sunday and Monday, was deemed a huge success after the first-stage Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft both managed controlled, upright landings on water. Once operational, the plan is to land both parts of the vehicle back at Starbase, a feat that it’s already achieved with the Super Heavy.
The Starship also deployed eight dummy Starlink satellites from its payload bay during its sub-orbital trip, marking its first-ever deployment during flight.
SpaceX released some dramatic footage on Wednesday showing a close-up of the Super Heavy’s 33 Raptor engines firing up at the start of its test flight, creating a colossal 17 million pounds of thrust as it left the launchpad.
Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, and is also designed to be fully reusable. NASA wants to use the vehicle to send crew and cargo to the moon, and possibly for the first human mission to Mars.
SpaceX and Musk have even loftier goals, as they want to use the Starship — or a future version of it — to build sustainable communities on Mars and beyond, with the ultimate aim of making human life multi-planetary for the long-term survival of civilization.
