The sixth launch of SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket Tuesday did not deliver a booster catch but did send a plush banana around the world.
Barely a month after the fifth flight test that featured Starship’s slowly descending first stage being snagged by massive metal arms on its launch tower, another Starship’s 33 Raptor engines lit at 4 p.m. Central at SpaceX’s Starbase facility at Boca Chica, Texas.
A live audience that included President-elect Trump, plus millions more on SpaceX’s stream, watched the world’s most powerful rocket lift off but did not see it return to its origin. Instead, a mission controller called out “booster offstage divert” soon after the second stage separated.
Starship moments after its launch (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
The booster instead splashed down softly in the Gulf of Mexico before toppling into the water. SpaceX commentator Dan Huot explained to livestream viewers that “we tripped a commit criteria” on the booster that required the diversion.
Meanwhile, the second stage continued its climb to a suborbital trajectory that would send it around the world before a reentry above the Indian Ocean. Viewers got a look inside Starship’s vast payload area and its sole cargo–a stuffed banana, chosen because it is about the size of a Starlink Mini antenna.
This stage of the flight also featured a brief relight of one of the upper stage’s six Raptor engines–a planned test to pave the way for future Starship missions that will have one of these vehicles refuel another in orbit.
The five previous Starship flights had not included that milestone; the first, in April 2023 saw the entire vehicle tumble out of control and explode 24 miles up, while a second last November ended with the second stage exploding just before its planned engine cut-off. Starship completed a suborbital flight on its third test in March but broke up about 40 miles above the water. The fourth flight in June ended with the upper stage reaching the water intact, if more than a little cooked around its fins from the atmospheric heating of reentry.
Plasma glows in purple and orange around the descending upper stage of Starship. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
NASA is banking on Starship’s potential for deep-space missions enabled by orbital refueling, having awarded SpaceX a $2.89 billion contract to develop a version of Starship’s upper stage to serve as a human landing vehicle for its Artemis missions to the moon later in this decade.
The agency has since granted a $3.4 billion contract to Blue Origin to build a second lunar lander. On Tuesday, NASA announced that it expects to sign up both firms to cargo versions of their landers.
As Starship’s upper stage began its reentry about 45 minutes after liftoff, the livestream featured multiple camera views of its exterior, streamed via Starlink.
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Huot and fellow commentators Kate Tice and Jessie Anderson advised that this configuration of the vehicle intentionally featured less heat-shielding material–some 2,100 fewer tiles–as part of a test to see how much weight SpaceX could wring out of the design.
“We gave it a little bit of a haircut,” Huot said.
The upper stage survived that trim, with the only visible signs of damage being a corner of one fin that glowed red from heating.
For the first time, a Starship upper-stage landing attempt happened during daylight. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
With the mission timed to have a reentry in daylight, views from Starship’s own cameras and a drone floating in the ocean clearly showed the stage light its engines one last time just above the water before landing vertically and then falling over. The vehicle did not explode, although parts appeared on fire–as astronomer Jonathan McDowell commented in a Bluesky post, a Viking funeral for the ship.
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About Rob Pegoraro
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