SpaceX on Sunday AEDT carried out the first-ever recovery of a spaceship, pulling off a successful "catch" of its Starship vessel as it returned to its launch site after a day in orbit.
The spaceship emerged from a cloudy sky after withstanding the extreme heat of re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, and descended slowly over Starbase before slipping smoothly between mechanical "chopstick arms" above Launch Pad 2.
The feat marked a milestone in the space industry's decades-long pursuit of fully reusable rocket systems — a goal that can drastically reduce mission costs and make more frequent launches possible.
"That was the Holy Grail of space flight, plummeting through fire to be snatched out of the air by steel. We caught a Starship and now, everything changes," SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said.
Crowds gathered on the Gulf of Mexico beach near Starbase broke into cheers as the spaceship eased into its high-tech nest on the 15th test flight of the world's biggest and most powerful rocket system.
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This time the Starship spacecraft that gives the rocket system its name orbited Earth 14 times and deployed 26 satellites for Elon Musk's Starlink satellite internet constellation during its 22-hour journey.
Until now SpaceX had captured returning booster rockets three times. However, the "catch" of Starship was extraordinarily complex because the spaceship fell much faster and from a much higher altitude than boosters do.
Clayton Swope, an aerospace expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, called the mission a "huge technical achievement and proves the whole idea of Starship as a fully reusable spaceship can work."
"Let's see how quickly they can do it again," he added.
The vessel's path home was carefully mapped out by engineers.
"If you want to get back to the east coast of Texas, you have to fly over the entire continent to get back there. So inevitably, you're flying over land and we spend a lot of time figuring out the safest way to do that," senior SpaceX engineer Lars Blackmore said.
Starship flew over sparsely inhabited desert areas, wove over towns and then carried out a "giant swoosh maneuver" in its final approach, looping around the cities of Texas' Rio Grande Valley and approaching its landing site from the east.
Some versions of Starship are designed to launch internet satellites and data centres into orbit, while other iterations will be made to ferry people to the moon and Mars.
US space agency NASA is expecting Starship to serve as a lunar lander on its Artemis mission. On Saturday, administrator Jared Isaacman congratulated Musk and SpaceX.
"It was almost magic ... Making more believers by the day ... one step closer to (the moon)," he said on X.
Musk, the world's richest person , has already revolutionised the space sector with the partially reusable Falcon rockets, which regularly launch satellites and carry astronauts to the International Space Station.
But the Starship project has been plagued by delays as SpaceX grapples with novel engineering challenges, including the unsolved problem of transferring fuel to the spaceship while in orbit — a requirement for any journey to the moon or Mars.
It will also need to further fine-tune the Super Heavy booster, which ran into a technical issue on Friday on its descent, forcing a diversion to the Gulf of Mexico just off the launch site. It, too, was supposed to have been caught by the "chopstick arms".
The booster automatically self-destructed — a fireball erupting from the booster — before hitting the water.
Following SpaceX's high-profile stock market debut in June that raised about US$85.7 billion ($126.5 billion), the company is investing heavily in production and launch capabilities.
During a tour of its 93,000-square-metre factory at Starbase on Friday, SpaceX officials told journalists it now has the capability to produce a spaceship every two weeks and a booster every four weeks.
