Incredible photos showed Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship performing its breakthrough “belly flop” maneuver as it splashed down in the Indian Ocean on Sunday morning. And that wasn’t even the most interesting part of the test flight.
The perfectly executed landing followed the Starship’s 232-foot Super Heavy booster rocket gracefully back to the launch pad seven minutes after liftoff, where it was “grabbed” by a pair of large mechanical arms nicknamed “Mechazilla.”
The successful test flight, which took off at sunrise at SpaceX’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, represented an engineering first and provided a glimpse into the future of space travel, starting with a pair of NASA missions with people on the moon in 2026.
“The tower has caught the missile!!” Musk wrote triumphantly in X. “Science fiction without the fiction part.”
SpaceX engineers were also excited about the historic landing and did not hold back on social media.
“I can’t say this on air, but HOLY S–T,” SpaceX’s Kate Tice wrote on the Musk-owned platform in a post sharing a video of the launch.
“I’m crying now,” wrote the company’s Dan Huot.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson also went to X to offer his congratulations to the company.
“As we prepare to return to the Moon under Artemis, continued testing will prepare us for the bold missions that lie ahead,” he wrote.
Sunday’s flight was the fifth test launch of the nearly 400-foot Starship rocket, which the company says it plans to use to carry supplies as well as astronauts to the moon and, one day, Mars.
SpaceX launched four previous Starship test flights starting in April 2023, making steady progress with each attempt.
During the first two attempts, in April and November last year, engine failures derailed the mission before the craft left the launch pad.
In March Starship successfully launched, but the Falcon Super Heavy booster crashed about 460 meters above the ocean and did not return to Earth as planned. The starship is believed to have disintegrated before its scheduled crash.
The most recent test launch, held in June, saw a successful launch and a controlled splash of its booster in the Gulf of Mexico and the ship itself in the Indian Ocean.
After completing the next few test flights, Starship’s next frontier will be landing an unmanned spacecraft on the Moon. Next, NASA says it hopes to send the first crewed mission — including the first woman — to the Moon sometime between 2027 and 2028.
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Image Source : nypost.com