The Starship stack launched nominally at 5:37 p.m. Eastern, consisting of Super Heavy Booster 14 and Ship 33—the first time a Block 2 Starship has flown and the first booster to include an engine reused from a previous launch.

The Ship's hot-stage separation from the booster appeared to go well at two minutes and 40 seconds but that's where things started to go wrong for the doomed second stage. We'll come back to that in a moment.

The plan was for the B14 booster to return to Earth in the loving embrace of the Mechazilla "chopstick" arms—the very same launch pad it had left just minutes before. That part of the mission was nearly flawless. While only 12 out of the 13 boostback engines fired at two minutes 26 seconds, the booster's many engines provide enough redundancy to make up for partial failures. Both the boostback burn shutdown (3:29) and the landing burn (6:35) went off flawlessly.

As for the catch... just watch.

"Atmospheric reentry speed is more than twice as fast as a bullet from an assault rifle," Elon Musk said late last night, "and this is the largest flying object ever made." (Screengrab image: via X)

That is the most powerful rocket ever to fly. And instead of falling into the ocean when its job was done, it returned like a fiery high-tech boomerang to exactly where it started. In just two or three years from now—maybe less—SpaceX will launch, catch, refuel, and have each Heavy Booster ready to fly again in hours.

Not months, like the Space Shuttle. Not weeks, like the SpaceX Falcon 9 workhorse. Hours. "Peak human engineering," indeed.

Flight Test 5 featured the first attempted catch, and it was a success. The catch on Flight Test 6 had to be waved off due to tower damage caused by the booster's 33 engines at launch. It likely would have been a success since the "water landing" was flawless. So SpaceX is now two for three on Super Heavy catches.

But the Ship—yikes.

The engines began failing at 7:39 into the mission that was supposed to take it into a partial orbit, followed by a controlled water landing in the Indian Ocean, half a world away. Instead, the Ship reentered the atmosphere over the nearby(ish) Turks & Caicos island in the Caribbean. It created quite the fireworks show... Subscribe for free to Breaking Christian News here

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