CEO Musk described the landing as soft, but admitted that pieces had come off the ship.
Space company SpaceX’s large Starship rocket managed to land on water for the first time on Thursday. The conclusion of the test flight is a significant milestone for the company’s prototype, which may one day take humans to Mars.
Images from a camera on board the ship showed flaming parts coming off the ship as it approached the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. Despite this, the ship eventually managed to stay together and survive re-entry into the atmosphere.
The CEO of the company, a billionaire Elon Musk described the landing as soft on X, the messaging service he owns, but admitted that pieces had come off the ship, and that at least one part was damaged.
“This was a great day for the future of humanity as a spacefaring civilization,” Musk added in a later update.
Starship was launched from the company’s space center in Texas on Thursday afternoon Finnish time. The ship’s journey took a little over an hour in total.
The director general of NASA congratulated the company
Starship was successfully launched already in March, but on the way back the connection to the ship was lost. The previous test flight attempt had ended in November with the explosion of the ship and the launch vehicle, while the first attempt ended in an intentional explosion in April of last year after, among other things, several engine failures had occurred during the test flight.
The Starship is slated to serve as the landing module for the US space agency NASA’s future probes, and it is hoped that one day it will carry cargo and crew all the way to Mars.
– Congratulations to SpaceX on the successful test flight of Starship this morning, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wrote in X.
Starship is about 120 meters tall with its launch vehicle, just under 30 meters higher than New York’s Statue of Liberty. Tampere’s Näsinneula viewing platform instead rises to roughly the same heights as SpaceX’s ship.
SpaceX is getting busy if the company wants to get its carrier animal ready before NASA’s 2026 manned flight to the surface of the Moon.