After aborting an initial launch attempt earlier in the day, SpaceX latest Starship prototype lifted off Wednesday, at 13:14 UTC and soared 6 miles above the company's Boca Chica Texas facilities.
The rocket, an early test version called SN10, demonstrated a few complex dances in mid-air before clinching a soft touch down.
At the end of its climb to 6.2 miles, each of the the rocket’s three Raptor engines gradually shut down to prepare for a brief free-fall back to land, reorienting itself horizontally with its “belly” facing the ground.
Then came the “belly flop” maneuver. The rocket’s three engines reignited to swoop itself into a vertical position for landing.
SN10 slowly descended on its landing pad, softly touching down but leaning slightly to the side. Insprucker declared it a success on SpaceX’s live feed: “Third time’s a charm, as the saying goes. We’ve had a successful soft touchdown on the landing pad. As a reminder, the key point of today’s test flight was to gather the data on controlling the vehicle while reentering, and we were successful in doing so.”
The exploded minutes later on its landing pad. Unlike the last two tests with SN8 and SN9, which launched successfully but exploded on their landing attempts, SN10 stuck a lopsided landing on a slab of concrete not far from its launchpad, appearing to survive its daring landing maneuver for a few moments before the explosion.
SpaceX's live feed ended moments before the explosion, but Spaceflight.com feed captured it. CEO Elon Musk tweeted at 14:35 UTC to celebrate that SN10 landed “in one piece,” but jokingly noted two minutes after that the rocket had an “honorable discharge.”
Starship is SpaceX’s next-generation, fully reusable Mars rocket system designed to ferry crews of astronauts and 100 tons of cargo on future missions to Earth orbit, the moon and eventually Mars.