SpaceX's Starship Looks Like an Alien Spacecraft as It Emerges from the Seafloor
SpaceX recovered the remains of its Starship rocket from the bottom of the sea as the company awaits approval to launch its megarocket for its fifth flight test.
The company’s billionaire founder and CEO Elon Musk posted a photo on X of a mangled Starship first-stage booster being fished out of the waters in the Gulf of Mexico. “Like the ruins of a futuristic, long-dead civilization,” Musk wrote on X.
Starship Super Heavy Booster Flight 4 pic.twitter.com/EMGpNVn58Q
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 23, 2024
The hardware looks pretty beat up from its test flight earlier in June, when the rocket reached orbital velocity and both stages completed their return to Earth, with the booster landing in the Gulf of Mexico. Starship’s fourth liftoff broke new grounds compared to its previous test flights, with the rocket largely surviving peak heating and max aerodynamic pressure during its controlled reentry.
SpaceX is all geared up for test flight number five, but the company has to wait for approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). “Starship stacked for Flight 5 and ready for launch, pending regulatory approval,” SpaceX wrote on X earlier this week. The company posted photos of the rocket looking propped and ready for liftoff, announcing that engineers had carried out a propellant load test and preflight checkouts to prepare for the upcoming test flight.
Starship may have to wait a little longer as the FAA recently revealed that it would not grant Starship a launch license until late November pending safety, environmental, and other licensing requirements. This did not please the rocket billionaire, who prefers a fast-paced timeline for his company. “We continue to be stuck in a reality where it takes longer to do the government paperwork to license a rocket launch than it does to design and build the actual hardware,” SpaceX wrote in a recent blog update.
It’s not clear why SpaceX sought to recover the ruins of Starship’s latest test flight. The company showed no previous intent of wanting to fish the Starship Super Heavy Booster from the sea following its fourth test flight, and yet here we are more than three months later. The operation to retrieve the booster was initially kept a secret, but SpaceX’s plans were discovered by a group of documentary filmmakers who specialize in shooting rocket launches, according to Universe Magazine; SpaceX reportedly used HOS Ridgewind, a vessel owned by Hornbeck Offshore, to fish out its Starship booster.
SpaceX may be looking to gather more data from the booster used during test flight four, or Musk may have suddenly grown paranoid over the rocket hardware lying at the bottom of the sea unattended.
