Watch Live as SpaceX Attempts Another High-Stakes Starship Booster Catch

SpaceX is preparing for its 2nd effort to drawback a monolithic rocket booster utilizing its elephantine “chopstick” arms, arsenic the institution gears up for Starship’s sixth trial flight.

Starship is acceptable to motorboat connected Tuesday, November 19, with a 30-minute motorboat model that opens astatine 5:00 p.m. ET. Just implicit a period since its groundbreaking booster catch, the rocket volition assistance disconnected from SpaceX’s Starbase installation successful Boca Chica, Texas, for different suborbital formation designed to trial Starship’s reusability.

Watch Starship's sixth formation trial → https://t.co/oIFc3u9laE https://t.co/acpdO2brbP

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 16, 2024

SpaceX volition broadcast Starship’s sixth trial formation connected its website and done the company’s account connected X, with a livestream scheduled to statesman astir 45 minutes earlier liftoff.

A fewer days earlier its scheduled launch, SpaceX moved Starship’s Super Heavy booster to the motorboat equine astatine Starbase to hole it for stacking atop the rocket’s precocious stage. The sixth trial formation volition people the fastest turnaround for a Starship rocket, having launched conscionable implicit a period ago. Happily for SpaceX, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted the institution support for integrated formation trial 5 that would besides let its Starship rocket to alert a sixth clip nether the aforesaid license. Previously, SpaceX would person to hold for the FAA to assistance it a caller license.

Starship lifted off for its 5th clip connected October 13, but for the archetypal time, Starship’s Super Heavy 232-foot-tall (71 meters) booster mildly came down towards a peculiar tower, named Mechazilla, which caught the rocket with its extended mechanical arms similar a elephantine brace of chopsticks. For its sixth launch, SpaceX volition effort different Starship booster catch, portion the precocious signifier volition reignite 1 of its Raptor engines successful abstraction for the archetypal clip and transportation retired maneuvering tests for reentry and descent.

With each trial flight, Starship moves person to packing utile payloads and reaching orbital heights. SpaceX launched its Starship rocket for the archetypal clip successful April 2023, but its debut was little than perfect arsenic the conveyance entered into a fatal tumble that forced crushed controllers to contented a self-destruct bid close earlier the four-minute people of the mission.

Things dilatory improved for the rocket each clip it took off. Starship’s fourth liftoff successful June broke caller grounds compared to its erstwhile trial flights, with the rocket mostly surviving highest heating and max aerodynamic unit during its controlled reentry. That paved the mode for its reentry and booster drawback earlier successful October, an awesome feat that SpaceX is hoping to repetition for a 2nd time.

Ultimately, SpaceX plans connected retrieving and reusing some Starship’s booster and its precocious stage. The company’s laminitis and CEO Elon Musk precocious expressed SpaceX’s extremity of catching the precocious signifier utilizing Mechazilla by aboriginal adjacent year. SpaceX is besides moving towards much predominant launches of Starship, with Musk aiming for 25 launches successful 2025. Whether oregon not the rocket tin support up with the abstraction billionaire’s ambition timelines remains to beryllium seen.