SpaceX has recovered its latest Starship rocket from the Indian Ocean in its largest retrieval mission to date.
The company, owned by Elon Musk, is currently transporting the vehicle back to its base in Texas in a trip that is expected to take several months. Images of the operation near Christmas Island were released by SpaceX late this week.
Starship — the world’s largest and most powerful rocket — launched on July 24 from Starbase, Texas. Although it was the 13th test flight of a fully assembled Starship, it became the first to endure the hourlong space-skimming trip and stay intact while floating.
open image in gallery“Congratulations to the entire SpaceX Recovery team for battling through challenging conditions to give our engineers access to a wealth of data to continue rapidly developing Starship,” the company said via X.
Musk aims to use Starship to send crews and cargo to Mars to build a city. However, the moon remains the immediate priority. NASA relies on Starship alongside Jeff Bezos’ Blue Moon lander to land astronauts on the moon as early as 2028.
President Donald Trump backed both goals during a Friday trip to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. He presented the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the four Artemis II astronauts who journeyed around the moon in April.
open image in galleryTrump also signed an executive order to create a “U.S. Space Academy” at an as-yet unannounced site. He said the new institution would be “a big deal” and one day rival the four existing U.S. service academies which train Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard officers.
“So you think of West Point, and you think of Annapolis, and you think of the Air Force Academy, and you think of the Coast Guard Academy. Great, they’re all great, but we’re going to have now a Space Force. We’re going to have an academy for what the people in this room love the most,” Trump said, referencing the audience of NASA employees and astronauts.
“It’ll serve both the United States Space Force as well as NASA and the civilian spaceflight industry, and it’ll attract, train, and graduate the very best of our nation, and our nation really has to offer.”