No Catch This Time, But IFT-6 Advances Starship Development

SpaceX’s sixth Starship Integrated Flight Test, IFT-6, may not have thrilled everyone with another spectacular booster catch, but the hour-long mission demonstrated advancements in the vehicle’s performance that pushes it another step along the path to eventual operational flights.

Starship IFT-6 lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas on time at 5:00 pm ET (4:00 pm Central). Previous test flights took off early in the morning, but this time the company wanted daylight views at the end of the mission when it splashed down in the Indian Ocean.

Liftoff of Starship! pic.twitter.com/rSLQ2DDy63

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 19, 2024

Starship has two stages:  the “booster” and “the ship.”  The booster is called Super Heavy and the ship is Starship, though the combination of the two is also called Starship.

With 33 methane-liquid oxygen (methalox) Raptor engines, the booster separates from the ship about two-and-a-half minutes after launch and either splashes down in the Gulf of Mexico or returns to the launch site. The ship, with six methalox engines, continues into space.

Like the previous test flights, this was a suborbital mission and the ship did not go into orbit. Instead it traveled three-quarters of the way around the globe, landing near Australia.

SpaceX hoped to replicate “the catch” on the last flight, IFT-5 when the booster returned to the launch tower a few minutes later to be caught in mid-air by mechanical “chopsticks.” This time it was not to be even though President-elect Donald Trump, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), and U.S. Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman were on hand to watch.

Donald Trump with Elon Musk to watch the Starship Flight 6 Launch. pic.twitter.com/DOwbPM04Vw

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) November 19, 2024

As the company cautions, everything must be just right at the launch tower and on the vehicle to permit the return. The launch tower was reported to be “go,” but something on the vehicle apparently was not and it diverted into a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

Super Heavy initiates its landing burn and softly splashes down in the Gulf of Mexico pic.twitter.com/BZ3Az4GssC

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 19, 2024

[Update,  January 4, 2025:  As it gets ready for IFT-7, SpaceX says “sensors on the tower chopsticks” were “damaged at launch and resulted in the booster offshore divert…”]

Reusability is a key feature of the Starship system and returning Super Heavy to the launch tower is a critical component of achieving that goal. Ultimately SpaceX wants to get a booster back to the tower, refuel it, and refly it within an hour.

The second stage, “the ship,” is what carries payloads to earth orbit and beyond. For the first time today Starship carried a payload — a toy banana — as a humorous nod to the “banana for scale” meme.  During the webcast SpaceX used a banana to illustrate how tall Starship is, at 121 meters (397 feet), compared to a human or a Falcon 9 rocket.

Among the test objectives today was relighting one of the ship’s six Raptor engines while in the vacuum of space to demonstrate they can be reignited for landing burns. They also tested heat shield materials. SpaceX commentators warned they were testing the ship “to and very likely beyond its limits” and “wackadoodle” events might occur, but the ship withstood all the challenges and landed upright — at least briefly — in the Indian Ocean as captured by cameras on the vehicle and a pre-positioned ocean buoy.

Splashdown confirmed! Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting sixth flight test of Starship! pic.twitter.com/bf98Va9qmL

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 19, 2024

Starship is SpaceX’s future, not only for launching satellites into Earth orbit, but to achieve Musk’s vision of sending millions of people to live on Mars.  In addition, NASA contracted with SpaceX in 2021 to use Starship as a Human Landing System (HLS) for the Artemis program to return American astronauts to the lunar surface. The first use of Starship HLS is for the Artemis III mission scheduled for September 2026, less than two years from now. SpaceX’s philosophy is to test as often as possible knowing there will be failures along the way. This launch was just 40 days after the last one.

Whether it will be ready by September 2026 is an open question. SpaceX must first conduct an uncrewed landing on the Moon — the contract does not require liftoff from the Moon, only landing — and Starship itself cannot go directly to the Moon, but must refuel at a fuel depot in Earth orbit.  No such depots exist and transferring cryogenic propellants like liquid methane and liquid oxygen in weightlessness has not been demonstrated.

Nonetheless, NASA is optimistic about Starship HLS, which will also land the Artemis IV crew. NASA contracted with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin for a separate lunar lander, Blue Moon, for Artemis V. It wants two service providers for “dissimilar redundancy” in case one is grounded for any reason and to ensure competition for future missions.

NASA wants both companies to develop cargo versions of their landers, too. Today it announced plans to give SpaceX a contract to land the pressurized lunar rover being developed by Japan’s space agency, JAXA, and for Blue Origin to land a lunar habitat.