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Donald Trump joined Elon Musk in Texas on Tuesday to watch a successful test launch of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, a demonstration of the unprecedented closeness between the world’s richest man and the newly chosen president of the United States.
Trump tweeted in advance of the launch: “I’m heading to the Great State of Texas to watch the launch of the largest object ever to be elevated, not only to Space, but simply by lifting off the ground. Good luck to @ElonMusk and the Great Patriots involved in this incredible project!”
Musk, the SpaceX founder and chief executive, said he was “honored” to have Trump present at the launch. The Texas senator Ted Cruz also attended.
After the rocket’s takeoff, it released its first stage booster back to Earth. SpaceX waived the booster’s return to the launch site, as was accomplished following a launch last month in a dramatic recapture, and opted instead for a fiery splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
No reason was immediately given for the booster setback, but Starship’s upper stage achieved the mission’s primary goal of a lengthy suborbital flight to evaluate hardware and software upgrades from earlier flights this year. Video of the landing showed it exploding into a ball of fire as it hit the water. SpaceX will retrieve the stage for evaluation, but regardless of what it discovers, it will not consider its inability to capture the booster as a failure.
The upper stage splashed down in the Indian Ocean 1hr 5min after its 4pm CT lift-off, and appeared to split into two halves. The segments were expected to sink and will not be recovered.
Trump, meanwhile, will soon be tasked with making highly consequential decisions about the future of US spaceflight. SpaceX already benefits from billions of dollars in US government contracts, and it is poised to secure more. The company’s Falcon rockets and Dragon capsules provide Nasa’s only crew-capable craft for flights to the international space station, and the Starship landing system was chosen to return humans to the moon, a mission currently scheduled for 2026.
With Musk almost inseparable from Trump since the election, christening himself the “First Buddy” and reportedly enjoying outsized influence in shaping the Republican’s second term, their joint appearance at SpaceX’s Starbase complex in Boca Chica for the launch of Starship’s sixth test flight was more than just mutual cheerleading.
Trump has yet to decide who he wants to be the next Nasa administrator as the agency approaches a pivotal moment in its history, and with Musk insisting he can get humans to Mars inside four years, government support, and more specifically dollars, will be crucial. Additionally, with speculation mounting that Nasa is considering dropping its own Space Launch System rocket program under a Trump administration, and relying more on the private sector for its return to the lunar surface and future missions to Mars, Musk may emerge with an even stronger hand.
“The founder of this century’s most innovative space company, Elon Musk, successfully used his fortune, time, and energy to help elect Donald Trump to president of the United States,” Ars Technica’s senior space editor, Eric Berger, wrote this month. “It’s entirely possible that the sitting chief executive of SpaceX could be the nation’s most important adviser on space policy, conflicts be damned.”
Trump, meanwhile, has made no secret of his desire for humans to achieve the highly ambitious goal of reaching Mars during his second term of office, and he is reportedly keen to see for himself the progress made on what is the world’s most powerful rocket when fully configured.Tuesday’s launch was Starship’s sixth experimental flight, following closely on the heels of its first fully successful test in June, when it rose to almost 130 miles in altitude and orbited Earth before splashing down intact in the Indian ocean.
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A fifth flight last month provided the spectacle of the capture of Starship’s recyclable first stage rocket booster at the Texas launch site in a pair of giant calipers known as chopsticks.
SpaceX was unable to repeat the capture on Tuesday during Flight 6, announcing in a tweet that it was sending the booster instead to a water splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
A ball of fire was visible when it landed, but later video footage showed the booster, or at least a substantial remnant of it, bobbing on the surface. The ethos of the company is to incorporate expendable prototypes on a pathway to longer-term progress and discovery. Changes from the previous flight included removing more than 2,000 heat-shield tiles on the spacecraft’s nosecone and elsewhere to evaluate revised streamlining capabilities. As well as the heat shield experiment, SpaceX sent a successful command for Starship to reignite one of its Raptor engines in space for the first time.
SpaceX intends to launch future Starship test missions almost monthly, including from Florida’s Cape Canaveral possibly from next year. With about 16m lbs of thrust, and a capacity to lift up to 165 tonnes from the Earth’s surface, Starship is almost twice as powerful as the Saturn V rockets that sent 12 astronauts to the moon between 1969 and 1972.