Starship reaches orbit, but booster explosion ends SpaceX double-catch bid

What does the failure actually change?

Not as much as you'd think, at least for now. The core goal — retrieving every single piece of the rocket for reuse — remains unmet, but the spacecraft is still in play. If it lands Saturday, SpaceX will claim half the prize. Elon Musk argues that full, fast reusability is the only path to the steady launch rates needed for moon bases and crewed Mars missions.

The history here counsels patience. The spacecraft portions of all 14 previous Starships ended up in the ocean, some by design, some as flaming wreckage. During the first full-scale test in 2023, multiple engines failed and the tumbling rocket triggered its own self-destruct system. The September test — the first to reach orbit — didn't even attempt recovery.

A busy orbit, then a finale

Shortly after reaching orbit, Starship deployed 26 of the company's most advanced Starlink satellites. The plan calls for 15 laps around Earth at roughly 170 miles (275 kilometers) before the spacecraft heads home for Saturday's grand finale.

"We are looking forward to some of that on-orbit Starlink capability on Artemis III," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman wrote on X after Starship reached orbit.

Why full reusability matters

SpaceX's smaller Falcon rockets, which carry NASA astronauts to the International Space Station and haul Starlinks from both Florida and California, are only partly recyclable. "They are still not fully reusable. We still throw that second stage away every single flight. Starship, we're going to catch both the first stage and second stage," SpaceX vice president of launch Kiko Dontchev said ahead of Friday's flight.

Scaled-up infrastructure plus full reusability, Dontchev told a NASA tech summit at Kennedy Space Center last week, is "how you go from zero launches to 10 to 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 to 100,000." SpaceX plans to start launching Starships from Florida within a few months and from Louisiana in a few years. Musk wants Starship to eventually replace Falcons entirely.

The NASA stakes

NASA is paying SpaceX billions to land Artemis astronauts on the moon with Starships, though Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is the other major contender. During next summer's Artemis III mission, astronauts will practice docking their capsule with a Blue Moon lander and then a Starship in Earth orbit — a rehearsal for a lunar touchdown as early as 2028. NASA expects to decide a year before the Artemis IV landing, which would be the first astronaut moonwalk in more than half a century, whether the moonwalkers ride Starship or Blue Origin's Blue Moon.

So one booster sits at the bottom of the Gulf, unexplained. The other half of the rocket is still circling overhead, one day from a catch that has never been tried. Saturday will tell us how close the future actually is.