Starbase, Texas - Elon Musk's SpaceX on Saturday successfully carried out the first-ever recovery of a spaceship, with its Starship vessel returning safely to its launch pad after a day in orbit.
Starship's recovery marked a milestone in the space industry's decades-long pursuit of fully reusable rocket systems – a goal that can drastically reduce mission costs and make more frequent launches possible.
"That was the Holy Grail of spaceflight, plummeting through fire to be snatched out of the air by steel. We caught a Starship and now everything changes," SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot said.
It was the 15th test flight of the world's biggest and most powerful rocket system.
This time the Starship spacecraft that gives the rocket system its name orbited Earth 14 times and deployed 26 satellites for Musk's Starlink satellite internet constellation during its 22-hour journey.
Until now, SpaceX had captured returning booster rockets three times. However, the "catch" of Starship was extraordinarily complex because the spaceship fell much faster and from a much higher altitude than boosters do.
Its path home was carefully mapped out by engineers.
"If you want to get back to the east coast of Texas, you have to fly over the entire continent to get back there. So inevitably, you're flying over land, and we spend a lot of time figuring out the safest way to do that," senior SpaceX engineer Lars Blackmore said.
Starship flew over sparsely inhabited desert areas, wove over towns and then carried out a "giant swoosh maneuver" in its final approach, looping around the cities of Texas' Rio Grande Valley and approaching its landing site from the east.
Some versions of Starship are designed to launch internet satellites and data centers into orbit, while other iterations will be made to ferry people to the Moon and Mars.
US space agency NASA is expecting Starship to serve as a lunar lander on its Artemis mission, and administrator Jared Isaacman congratulated SpaceX on Friday for "another spectacular launch" – without mentioning the booster disappointment.
Musk, the world's richest person, has already revolutionized the space sector with the partially reusable Falcon rockets, which regularly launch satellites and carry astronauts to the International Space Station.
But the Starship project has been plagued by delays as SpaceX grapples with novel engineering challenges, including the unsolved problem of transferring fuel to the spaceship while in orbit – a requirement for any journey to the Moon or Mars.