SpaceX's Starship aces first return to Texas

Starbase, Texas - SpaceX's Starship spacecraft completed its longest flight to date and successfully returned to the Texas launch tower from which it was launched, marking a significant milestone in the company's decade-long pursuit of developing a fully reusable rocket. The two-stage rocket, with its Super Heavy booster at the bottom, carried Starship to space on Friday.

However, the booster had failed to return to the launch pad 10 minutes after liftoff, delaying the recovery of both rocket parts for the first time. The Starship upper stage's successful return after orbiting Earth 14 times for over 22 hours demonstrated a crucial engineering achievement in the development of Starship, which Elon Musk envisions as the company's future workhorse for satellite business and ambitions to put humans on the moon and Mars.

After deploying 26 Starlink satellites in orbit Friday night at an altitude of 161 miles (260km), Starship ignited one of its engines for an atmospheric plunge, facing extreme heat as its orbital speed slowed to a supersonic free-fall over SpaceX's Starbase facilities on the Gulf coast of south Texas. It then vertically flipped itself and steered towards the launch tower, where two mechanical "chopstick" arms secured the spacecraft as it hovered.

While this recovery is a key milestone, SpaceX has not yet recovered both Starship stages in a single mission, and its heat-shield tiles are not yet fully reusable.