SpaceX has made an incredible catch of its Super Heavy Booster during the seventh test flight of its Starship rocket, but has lost the vehicle. Launched at 5:37 p.m. ET today, Thursday January 16, from SpaceX’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas, this is only the second time that the enormous booster of the Starship has been caught, as part of SpaceX’s aim to create a reusable heavy lift vehicle.
However, the upper stage of the Starship — the part which should travel into orbit and deploy payloads — seemed to have issues with its engines during its ascent, and communications with it were lost around 10 minutes after launch, around the time of main engine cut-off.
“It successfully separated, we did see that hot staging maneuver and we did see all six of Ship’s engines on the way uphill during its ascent, but as we were getting to the end of that ascent and burn we saw engines dropping out on telemetry, and we have since lost contact with the Ship,” said SpaceX commentator Dan Huot. “At this point, we are assuming that the Ship has been lost.”
The Starship undertaking the test flight today was a brand new vehicle, with various changes made to the hardware compared to previous test flights, which brings a range of risks.
“We do believe we have lost the ship during its ascent phase,” said Kate Tice, senior quality engineering manager at SpaceX. “But this was a new version of Starship, and it was intentionally designed and flown in order to test the envelope, as we have done with every one of these test flights — the key word there being ‘test’. And really trying to understand the boundaries and the maximums for the ability of this vehicle to fly, and understand where those boundaries are. We always knew that excitement was guaranteed today — success, not guaranteed.”
However, the SpaceX team still has something to celebrate, as the booster, or first stage, was successfully caught at the Boca Chica facility. The separation of booster and ship was successful, and booster came back in to the giant robot arms of the tower, named Mechazilla.
Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster! pic.twitter.com/aq91TloYzY
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 16, 2025
Even with the loss of the Starship, the SpaceX team was positive they would continue development: “It was great to see booster come down, but we are obviously bummed out about ship,” said Huot. “We obvisouly need to go through all the data. It’s going to take some time. In the next hours or days we’re going to figure out exactly what happened, come back, fly the next one, get even farther… We’ll figure out what ended our day today and make sure it doesn’t end our day tomorrow.”
