SpaceX Starship launch live: Massive rock successfully splashes down in Indian Ocean following 6th flight test

In the company’s sixth test flight of its two-stage Starship rocket, SpaceX could largely report that it was successful in its objectives.

While Elon Musk’s private space firm did not attempt to land its Super Heavy booster rocket back on the launch pad, repeating their stunning success with a ‘catch’ last month, the firm showed impressive results with the upper stage rocket.

Starship’s upper stage not only succeeded in re-lighting its rocket engines in the vacuum of space, but also managed to reorient properly and land slowly in the Indian Ocean as planned.

These moves were critical tests ahead of Musk’s hope of one day relanding this portion of the rocket upright on a launch pad as a truly reusable spacecraft.

America’s once and future president, Donald Trump, joined SpaceX’s billionaire CEO to enjoy the test launch from the firm’s control room in Brownsville, Texas.

Three members of the US Senate Bill Hagerty, Ted Cruz and Kevin Cramer, were also in attendance, as were members of the Trump family.

Starship’s upper stage craft splashed down in the Indian Ocean after a ‘great reorientation’ move, amid cheers from the team in mission control.

The craft slowly descended into the ocean shutting its rocket engines off, one by one, as planned.

‘Incredible! We really pushed the limits on ship and it made it all the way back down to Earth,’ one SpaceX team member said.

This landing followed Starship igniting one of its Raptor engines while orbiting in space for the first time, which Musk said was one of the four core objectives for Tuesday’s test flight.

But despite this feel good display, SpaceX’s team noted that they do not expect to be able to recover this craft from the Indian Ocean.

‘We are pushing the limits of [the] ship today,’ the team said as the upper stage portion of the rocket heated the air around it into a plasma, visible on the live feed.

‘Don’t be surprised if this is not entirely smoothe sailing all the way down to the ocean’s surface,’ they told viewers, ‘but we are not expecting to recover the vehicle.’

‘Don’t be surprised if we see some whackadoodle stuff,’ a member of the SpaceX team noted as the upper-stage craft began reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.

Reentry offers a significant test of adjustments that have been made to the craft’s heat shields: ‘There are a number of things that we are testing out intentionally to see what the ship can take,’ according to a SpaceX mission control member.

‘Knowing what those limits are will really help us design the vehicle of the future,’ another member of the team chimed in.

Some heat shield tiles, in fact, have been removed for this Integrated Flight Test-6 (IFT-6), in part a test to see if the ship’s stainless steel ‘holds up.’

‘This will be firing up one of those three c-level raptors,’ SpaceX mission control said on the live feed, referencing the Raptor Vacuum (RVac) engines, made by SpaceX’s team for operating in the vacuum of space.

‘We had attempted this once previously on Flight 3,’ SpaceX noted, ‘but ended up skipping it when we had some attitude control issues with the ship.’

‘We are on the dark side of the planet right now,’ they said as the team waited to see if the RVac would succeed in lighting up.

‘There’s some light! There’s that Raptor relit,’ the team announced, marking a key first step for future orbital missions

Below, a screencapture of Starship, from a camera on the rocket itself, just 30 seconds into today’s launch.

Starship’s ‘Super Heavy’ booster made its ‘plan b’ splashdown landing successfully off the coast of Texas, in a stunning pyrotechnic display.

While this sixth test of the SpaceX megarocket had to abort the company’s plan for a catch of this first-stage booster — via the company’s ‘chopstick’ arms on its launch tower — this back-up plan saw no major issues.

The decision not to use the catch tower, dubbed ‘Mechazilla,’ came down to a command by the mission’s flight director.

‘If this command is not sent prior to the completion of the boostback burn, or if automated health checks show unacceptable conditions with Super Heavy or the tower,’ SpaceX wrote in a prelaunch statement, ‘the booster will default to a trajectory that takes it to a landing burn and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.’

President-elect Trump’s granddaughter, Kai Trump, the daughter of Donald Trump Jr. and Vanessa Haydon, also made an appearance to watch today’s launch.

The future first granddaughter’s profile has risen considerably since her appearance at the Republican National Convention this summer, drawing attention to her social media presence and golfing aspirations.

Arriving at SpaceX’s rocket development site in Boca Chica, Donald Trump dotingly gave the billionaire mogul a bit of emotional support.

Trump patted the world’s richest man (Musk’s net worth is currently an estimated $320 billion) sweetly on the back.

SpaceX’s team revealed that at four minutes and 55 seconds into the launch the Super Heavy booster will not be caught by giant mechanical arms, nicknamed ‘Chopsticks.’

Musk successfully attempted the catch last month, but Tuesday’s conditions were not optimal for the feat.

Below, video of the Super Heavy booster as it detached from the upper stage Starship spacecraft during today’s test flight.

Not all of the criteria for a booster catch was met and so the flight director did not command the booster to return to the launch site, said SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot. He did not specifying what went wrong.

An aerial view of the IFT-6 test launch as the smoke from the Starship’s raptors cascade radially all around it in an impressive display of power.

The Super Heavy booster ignited its 33 Raptor engines, shooting smoke and a ball of fire from its base, with the 400-foot-tall Starship stacked on top.

The two-stage rocket soared up toward space, as the SpaceX team assured the world that everything was working as expected.

The rocket hit the sixth-mile market within just one minute after launch, passing the point of maximum air pressure.

Separation of the boost happened around two minutes and 30 seconds. The livestream showed Super Heavy fall back to Earth.

According to recent posts by SpaceX, here’s what the company hopes to achieve with today’s launch, dubbed Integrated Flight Test-6 (IFT-6).

Firstly, the private spaceflight firm hopes to ‘expand the envelope on ship and booster capabilities’ and thus get closer to the project’s longterm goal of ‘bringing reuse of the entire system online.’

The test’s further objectives include having the booster once again return to the launch site for a ‘chopsticks’ landing catch, a successful reignition of the upper stage ship’s Raptor engine while past the Kármán line in space, and a ‘stress test’ of changes to the two-stage craft’s heatshields.

SpaceX also hopes to learn more about how successful their changes and tweaks have been to the manuevering hardware and software — specifically how it impacts the Starship upper stage vehicle’s reentry and descent over the Indian Ocean at the end of this flight.

SpaceX told press that, if conditions are not ideal, its Super Heavy booster will default to a trajectory that will force it to splashdown safely in the Gulf of Mexico.

The company said that the booster’s return to the launchpad will only take place if the conditions are right to ensure the safety of the public and the SpaceX team.

Ideally, however, this afternoon’s launch will provide valuable data on the particulars of its ‘chopstick’ landing back on the launch pad.

Musk has said that ‘thousands of small design changes [are] also being tested,’ although he didn’t specifically state what those changes happen to be.

But, per SpaceX itself, the company hopes to further observe and improve its hardware and software performance, based on data collected during this test, to ‘increase structural strength at key areas, and shorten the timeline to offload propellants from the booster following a successful catch.’

In its current iteration, Starship is a two-stage reusable space vehicle and the largest and most powerful rocket ever built.

Musk has boasted that his Starship is now ‘more than twice as powerful as the Saturn V Moon rocket’ which launched NASA’s Apollo 4 mission in 1967.

Consisting of the Starship upper stage and the Super Heavy booster, this version of Starship is powered by six engines: three normal ‘Raptor’ engines and three Raptor Vacuum (RVac) engines, tailor-made by SpaceX’s team for the unique needs of operating in the vacuum of space.

The Super Heavy booster, which will help the craft break free of Earth’s atmosphere, is powered by 33 Raptor engines, with 13 at the center and 20 more around the perimeter of the booster rocket’s aft or trail end.

These myriad individual boosters are what will be blasting in a delicate dance to stick the reusable craft’s now famous ‘chopstick’ landing.

Musk has set an epic fantasy tone for his sixth test launch of Starship.

The billionaire mogul posted a photo showing a pair of launch scaffolds used to keep the spacecraft stable during takeoff, with an allusion to Tolkien’s second ‘Lord of the Rings’ novel, ‘The Two Towers.’

Tolkien was never clear publicly on which of the five towers in this fantasy novel were being directly referenced with his book’s title, and it is even less clear here what subtext Musk is endeavoring to convey.

President-elect Donald Trump and his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., have landed in Texas ahead of the launch and are now meeting with Musk, Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz and others.

And, come late January, Trump’s second term could radically accelerate Musk’s designs on sending human beings to Mars via his Starship.

While NASA’s current plans are more humbly (or realistically) to deploy a version of Starship for the US space agency’s Artemis missions to bring astronauts back to the moon — Trump may well decide to approve something more ambitious.

Previously, Musk has stated that SpaceX could launch uncrewed Starships to Mars in 2026 as a ‘proof of concept’ test of this plans feasibility.

Earth and Mars are at their closest every 26 months, making the windows between possible launches longer than two years, however, which will place high stakes and potential cost risks on each attempt.