SpaceX's ambitious Starship double-catch attempt fails as booster ends up in Gulf

SpaceX's attempt to recover both stages of its Starship rocket during a single mission was thwarted on Friday after the Super Heavy booster ended up in the Gulf, with the company saying it would not attempt to recover it due to a technical issue, as cited by AP.

The launch was part of SpaceX's most ambitious Starship test yet, a 22-hour mission aimed at demonstrating the recovery of both the rocket's booster and upper stage. The company hopes to make the entire rocket reusable, a development that could significantly accelerate launch operations and support future missions to the Moon and Mars. If successful, the test would have marked the first time that every part of a rocket launched into orbit was recovered for reuse.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk sees full reusability as key to achieving the rapid and frequent launch rates needed to build bases on the Moon and send humans to Mars. The previous test in September was the first Starship mission to reach orbit, but SpaceX did not attempt to recover either rocket stage.

SpaceX plans to begin launching Starships from Florida within a few months and from Louisiana in the coming years. The company believes expanded launch infrastructure and full rocket reusability will be essential to scaling up its operations. "How do you go from zero launches to 10 to 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 to 1,00,000," Dontchev said.

Meanwhile, SpaceX's smaller Falcon rockets will continue to carry astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA from Cape Canaveral and launch Starlink satellites from California. Other satellites will also continue to use Falcon rockets for now, although Musk intends for Starship to eventually replace them. "Falcon rockets are still not fully reusable. We still throw that second stage away every single flight. Starship, we're going to catch both the first stage and second stage," Dontchev said.

Nasa has committed billions of dollars to SpaceX to develop Starship as a lunar lander for its Artemis programme. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is another major contender for the contract. Nasa is expected to decide a year before the Artemis IV lunar landing, the first crewed Moon landing in more than half a century, whether to use Musk's Starship or Bezos' Blue Moon lander.

During the Artemis III mission, scheduled for next summer, astronauts will practise docking their spacecraft with both Blue Moon and Starship in orbit around Earth. The mission is intended to prepare for a crewed lunar landing as early as 2028.