SpaceX bids to catch entire rocket in most ambitious test yet

SpaceX’s mega rocket Starship is stacked and prepared for a test flight from Starbase, Texas (Eric Gay/AP)

SpaceX is launching Starship into orbit on Friday in its boldest test yet: a 22-hour flight that aims to recapture the entire rocket in a move meant to accelerate Moon and Mars travel.

If all goes well, the massive booster will return to its Texas pad six minutes after blasting off and the bullet-shaped spacecraft will steer there the next day.

Both will be plucked from midair by mechanical arms secured to the launch tower.

Everything was on track for Friday’s planned late afternoon launch of the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket, pending Federal Aviation Administration approval.

If Elon Musk and his team succeed, it will be the first time every single piece of a rocket that is launched into orbit gets retrieved for the purpose of recycling.

Mr Musk sees this leading to the kind of fast and consistent launch rates necessary for building Moon bases and sending people to Mars.

“It’s hard to describe how I’m going to feel when we pull this off,” SpaceX’s Kiko Dontchev, vice president of launch, said at a Nasa tech summit last week at Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre. “It’s so incredibly exciting. It’s such a feat of engineering.”

Once in orbit, Starship will deliver 26 of the company’s most advanced Starlink satellites.

The plan is for Starship to complete 15 laps around the world at an altitude of around 170 miles before heading back to the launch site for Saturday’s grand finale.

SpaceX has already made three booster grabs at the company’s sprawling Starbase near the US-Mexico border.

This will be the first attempt to capture the upgraded version that stretches 72 metres – the production model for Moon and Mars travel.

It will also be the first time the company attempts to catch the spacecraft.

The spacecraft portion of the 14 previous Starships ended up in the ocean, either by design at flight’s end or by accident in a stream of flaming wreckage.

Nasa is paying SpaceX billions of dollars to land Artemis astronauts on the Moon with Starships. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is the other major player.

NASA expects to decide a year before the Artemis IV lunar landing – the first by astronauts in more than half a century – whether to get the moonwalkers to the surface with Musk’s Starship or Bezos’ Blue Moon.

During next summer’s Artemis III mission, astronauts will practise docking their capsule with a Blue Moon and then a Starship in orbit around Earth. That will set the stage for an Artemis moon touchdown as early as 2028.