SpaceX built a 124-meter rocket, a launch tower with giant mechanical arms nicknamed chopsticks, and a whole mythology about reusability. Then, on Friday, the booster it was supposed to snatch out of the sky got waved off at the last minute and dropped into the ocean, bursting into flames on the way down. The top half is still in orbit, and nobody knows yet whether it will get a catch of its own.
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Narrated and captioned. Made by The Dingo Daily from this article.
The Chopsticks Stayed Hungry
Here's what happened, per BBC News. Starship lifted off from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas at 16:45 local time on Friday. About six and a half minutes later, the Super Heavy booster was supposed to glide back to the launch tower and get plucked from the air by the chopsticks.
Instead, it got diverted to the ocean. It caught fire as it came down. The arms caught nothing but humidity.
A SpaceX spokesperson said on the livestream that safety is the number one priority and that the company is still testing maneuvers it has never done before on these vehicles. Fair enough. Nobody wants a falling skyscraper full of cryogenic propellant aimed at the building that holds the arms.
Wait, Haven't They Done This Before?
Yes, and that's the thing. SpaceX has caught the Super Heavy booster on three earlier test flights. The catch itself is not the new part.
The new part was supposed to be the whole point of this flight: the company's first attempt to fully recover its rocket, booster and ship both. The ship, the upper stage, has never been grabbed by the chopsticks. It only reached orbit for the first time in September, and every time before that it splashed down in the ocean.
So the headline attraction was the one thing nobody has ever pulled off, and the opening act that was supposed to be routine got scrubbed. Good times.
The Ship Is Still Up There With 26 Satellites
The top half is carrying on. It's deploying 26 satellites that will join the Starlink constellation, the high-speed internet network that SpaceX sells from orbit.
The plan is for the ship to loop the Earth 14 times and return to the launch tower 22.5 hours after liftoff, where a second catch may be attempted. SpaceX said it will only decide to go for the catch after carefully assessing the vehicle in space, and there are multiple points where it can bail and drop the thing in the ocean instead. The call is expected at about 15:15 local time on Saturday.
So the company is now hoping the harder half of the job works after the easier half just failed to happen. That's one way to manage expectations.
Why Anyone Should Care About Reusability
Strip away the Texas theatrics and there's a real point here. In 2015, SpaceX became the first company to vertically land part of a rocket with its Falcon 9 booster. Those rockets now fly more than 100 times a year, and reusing the bottom stage has dramatically cut the cost of launch.
Prof Malcolm Macdonald, president of the Royal Aeronautical Society, said full reusability has the potential to fundamentally change the economics of accessing space. He also cautioned that one successful flight would not prove the model, but could mark a transition from showing that Starship can fly to showing how it could operate.
That's the prize. Throwing away a rocket after every flight is like flying a 747 once and then scrapping it. Make the whole stack reusable and the math changes. That's the pitch, anyway.
The Moon Deadline Is Doing Cartwheels
Now the part that should make taxpayers sweat. SpaceX has a NASA contract to turn the Ship into a lander that takes astronauts down to the lunar surface. NASA wants humans on the Moon in 2028, a timeline the BBC politely calls highly ambitious.
Artemis III is planned for summer 2027, with four astronauts in an Orion spacecraft attempting to dock with both SpaceX's and Blue Origin's landers. The pace of Starship's development has been far slower than SpaceX intended, and it needs a lot of progress in the coming months to hit those commitments.
The backup plan isn't exactly roomy either. Blue Origin's rocket exploded earlier this year and totally destroyed its launchpad in Florida. It promised to be back by the end of this year. It's now early 2027. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman says America is in a race with China, which plans to land taikonauts on the Moon by 2030.
The Dingo Take
The people with the most to lose here aren't the shareholders, though SpaceX went public this year and they'll be watching every second of this livestream with a stress rash. It's the four astronauts who are supposed to climb into an Orion capsule next summer and dock with landers that have, so far, never been caught, never been fully recovered, and in one case sit on a launchpad that no longer exists. Those folks are being asked to trust a schedule. Rockets don't read schedules.
Look, nobody should cheer for a fireball over the Gulf, and nobody should pretend a deliberate abort for safety is a disaster. Diverting the booster was the correct call, and a company that skips the abort to protect its own highlight reel is how you end up with a body count. But the gap between the confident timelines and the actual hardware is getting hard to ignore. A race with China is a fine thing to put in a press release. It's a lousy substitute for a lander that works.
So here's the situation: the Moon plan runs through a rocket that is still learning to land, backed up by a rival whose launchpad is rubble. If the ship gets caught Saturday, great, genuinely, put it on a T-shirt. If it doesn't, the 2028 date is already living on borrowed time, and somebody at NASA should say so out loud before the clock does it for them.
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