SpaceX’s latest test flight of its Starship vehicle on Tuesday got off to a sobering startokebet, as the company was unable to recover the enormous booster stage of the rocket, the most powerful ever built. But about an hour later, the vehicle’s upper stage was more successful with the completion of a daring maneuver to splash down in the Indian Ocean.
The late-afternoon launch brought President-elect Donald J. Trump to the company’s South Texas launch site along the Gulf of Mexico for a show of solidarity with Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and the world’s richest man, who helped catapult the former president back to the White House.
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The two men were shown discussing the launch and its aftermath. But SpaceX’s highly produced video livestream of the flight stuck to rocket science, as the company’s engineers highlighted their work in pursuit of Mr. Musk’s dream of sending people to Mars in the years ahead. And Tuesday’s flight offered contrasting moments of the company’s engineering achievements and the work that remains to be completed to build a rapidly reusable rocket.
“Development testing, by definition, is unpredictable,” said Jessie Anderson, a manufacturing engineering manager at SpaceX and a host of the live broadcast. “But that is exactly why we test.”
The Starship rocket system is the largest ever built — 397 feet tall, or about 90 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty, including the pedestal.
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