Super Heavy-Starship launches on sixth test flight, skips tower catch

Ship 31 and Super Heavy Booster 13 climb away from Starbase on the sixth test flight of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle. Image: Chuck Briggs/Spaceflight Now.

With President-elect Donald Trump and newly-minted efficiency czar Elon Musk looking on, SpaceX launched the world’s most powerful rocket on its sixth test flight Tuesday, an up-and-down trip to space by a gargantuan Super Heavy-Starship to evaluate a variety of safety and performance upgrades.

Shattering the afternoon calm with an ear-splitting roar, the huge 30-foot-wide, 397-foot-tall rocket blasted off from Musk’s sprawling Boca Chica, Texas, manufacturing and test facility on the Gulf Coast near Brownsville at 5 p.m. EST, the opening of a 30-minute launch window.

With its 33 Raptor engines gulping 40,000 pounds of liquid oxygen and methane per second, the Super Heavy-Starship majestically climbed away to the east over the Gulf of Mexico atop a brilliant plume of white-hot flame and a churning cloud of exhaust.

Two-and-a-half minutes after liftoff, after pushing the rocket out of the dense lower atmosphere, the Starship’s six Raptor engines ignited to continue the climb to space while the Super Heavy booster fell away, reversed course and began flying back to the launch site.

The flight plan called for the Super Heavy to return to its launch pad for capture by a giant set of mechanical arms. But an issue of some sort, either with the rocket or the capture mechanism on the pad, prompted flight controllers to order a diversion to splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

As it was, the final descent appeared normal and well controlled as the rocket restarted three Raptors to slow is rate of fall before settling to a vertical, low-speed splashdown just off the shore at Boca Chica while the Starship upper stage continued on into space.

The Super Heavy Booster diverts to a landing off shore of Boca Chica Beach. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now. A fireball erupts from the Super Heavy Booster following its splashdown in the Gulf. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now.

The International Space Station was passing over eastern Mexico at the moment of liftoff.

“We just saw Starship launch,” astronaut Sunita Williams radioed. “Pretty awesome! We’re getting pictures.” Crewmate Don Pettit told flight controllers in Houston “it looked pretty cool from orbit. We’re downloading them now.”

Trump flew to Texas earlier in the afternoon and watched the launch and booster splashdown with Musk. During a September 21 speech in Wilmington, N.C., Trump urged Musk to “get those rocket ships going because we want to reach Mars before the end of my term. We want to do it.”

As with the rocket’s fifth test flight last month, the primary goals of Tuesday’s flight was to boost the Starship out of the lower atmosphere on a sub-orbital flight to re-entry over the Indian Ocean while the Super Heavy booster executed the return-to-launch-site mid-air capture or, as it turned out, a safe ocean splashdown.

But this time around, one of the Starship’s methane-burning Raptor engines was successfully re-started in space to demonstrate the propulsion system’s ability to perform critical maneuvers and future de-orbit burns.

Engineers also were testing “a suite of heatshield experiments and maneuvering changes for ship reentry and descent over the Indian Ocean,” SpaceX said on its web page, along with software and booster hardware upgrades intended to add additional propulsion system redundancy and increase the rocket’s structural strength.

Spectacular video from cameras mounted on the Starship showed a sheath of super-hot plasma engulfing the vehicle as it rapidly slowed in a blaze of atmospheric friction.

And even though it was using an older-generation heat shield and flying in a deliberately more difficult-to-control orientation, the Starship executed a picture-perfect splashdown, firing three Raptors to slow down for a vertical descent into the ocean.

Ship 31 makes a gentle splashdown in the Indian Ocean west of Australia. Image: SpaceX.

The October test flight was the first featuring a successful launch pad catch and the first with a Starship that reached the Indian Ocean essentially intact. For Tuesday’s flight, launch was moved to the late afternoon in Texas to ensure a daylight splashdown for video documentation.

The Super Heavy-Starship is the centerpiece of Musk’s drive to develop a fully reusable heavy-lift rocket, which he says is the key to making humanity “multi-planetary.” And now, with Trump’s support, he may be able to kick start that effort.

Shortly after winning the presidential election, Trump announced that Musk and one-time presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy would lead a new agency known as the Department of Government Efficiency. The goal, Trump said in a statement, is to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulation, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.”

Musk said in the same statement: “This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people.”

SpaceX already holds billions in government contracts and is building a variant of the Starship to serve as the initial lunar lander in NASA’s Artemis program. It remains to be seen how Musk’s role in the new administration might advance SpaceX’s plans or how questions about conflicts of interest might be resolved.

Politics aside, “we are looking at a serious effort to return to the moon, and maybe a serious effort … to send, if not humans to Mars in the next four years, a lot of stuff and a lot of infrastructure that will enable humans to get to Mars,” said Casey Drier, director of space policy for the Planetary Society.

“Maybe not in four years, but maybe in the next ten,” he said.

The key to those plans is the Super Heavy-Starship.

The Super Heavy booster is powered by 33 Raptor engines burning liquid methane and oxygen to generate more than 16 million pounds of thrust at full throttle, more than twice the liftoff power of NASA’s legendary Saturn 5 moon rocket. The Starship is powered by six Raptors and will be capable of carrying astronauts, satellites and science probes.

For its initial high-risk test flights, the rocket is flying without crew members.

Like the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, the 230-foot-tall first stage is designed to be fully reusable, flying itself back to the launch pad where giant “chopsticks” mounted on the pad gantry can catch the booster as it descends, enabling rapid servicing, re-fueling and launch.

Unlike the Falcon 9, which uses a throw-away second stage, the 160-foot-tall Starship also is reusable, capable of safely returning to Earth after launching satellites or carrying astronauts to the moon and eventually, Musk says, to Mars.

SpaceX already ferries astronauts and cosmonauts to and from the International Space Station using Falcon 9s carrying the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and is building a variant of the Starship for NASA to carry astronauts back to the moon’s surface in the 2026-27 timeframe.

The company also launches commercial and military satellites, is building a powerful space tug for NASA to help drive the International Space Station safely out of orbit when the program is retired in 2030 and is launching thousands of its own Starlink satellites to provide global access to the internet.

“SpaceX functionally has the monopoly on access to space,” said Drier. “Pretty much any asset that you want to launch into space, whether you’re the U.S. government or commercial provider, a satellite company, even the European Space Agency, they are all using SpaceX rockets.”