Private · SpaceXcommercial
November 19, 2024
Starship Flight 6 — propulsive soft splashdown
Late afternoon on 19 November 2024, the crowds at Boca Chica expected an encore. Five weeks earlier, Starship's Flight 5 had stunned the world when the launch tower's chopstick arms caught a falling Super Heavy booster out of the sky. Now Flight 6 was set to do it again, and the audience at Starbase included president-elect Donald Trump, standing alongside Elon Musk. At 4:00 p.m. Central time, the 33 Raptor engines of Booster 13 lit and the largest rocket ever built climbed off the pad, just 37 days after its predecessor, the fastest turnaround in the program's history.
Then the script changed. As the booster fell back toward Texas, controllers called a 'booster offshore divert': communications had been lost with the launch tower's computer, and without certainty, SpaceX would not risk the tower. Booster 13 diverted to the Gulf of Mexico, hovered on its engines, and settled into the water just offshore before tipping over and erupting in a fireball. Musk explained afterward that the catch would probably still have worked, but the team erred on the side of caution. The tower stood untouched, ready for the next attempt.
Ship 31 delivered the day's quieter milestone. Thirty-eight minutes into the coast, a single Raptor engine reignited in space for the first time, a brief burn that proved the deorbit capability every future orbital Starship flight depends on. The ship carried Starship's first-ever payload, a plush banana strapped in as a zero-gravity indicator, and flew with deliberately removed heat shield tiles and a steeper angle of attack to stress-test its protection. The afternoon launch time was chosen so that, 65 and a half minutes after liftoff, cameras caught Starship descending through a bright Indian Ocean sky, flipping upright, landing softly on the sea, and toppling over intact. It was the last flight of the first-generation ship; the program now pointed toward orbit.
“Lost comms to the launch tower computer. Catch would probably still have worked, but we weren't sure, so erred on the side of caution.”
Mission Data
Launched
19 Nov 2024, 22:00 UTC, Starbase, Texas
Vehicle
Ship 31 / Booster 13
Flight duration
≈65.5 minutes
Raptor relight
First-ever in space, ≈38 min into flight
Booster
Propulsive Gulf splashdown after catch wave-off
Turnaround from Flight 5
37 days
Key Facts
Starship's first official payload was a plush banana, flown as a zero-gravity indicator and a wink at the phrase 'banana for scale'.
The in-space Raptor relight lasted only seconds, but it was the gating capability for everything that follows: without a proven deorbit burn, Starship cannot be allowed to fly full orbital missions over Earth.
The booster catch was cancelled not by the rocket but by the ground: lost communications with the launch tower computer triggered the divert, and Musk said the catch 'would probably still have worked'.
President-elect Donald Trump watched the launch from Starbase alongside Elon Musk, two months before taking office.
SpaceX deliberately removed heat shield tiles and flew the ship at a steeper angle of attack to find the design's limits, and the afternoon liftoff was timed so the Indian Ocean splashdown happened in daylight on camera.
Why It Mattered
Flight 6 closed out Starship's first generation by proving the two things suborbital tests still owed the program: that a Raptor engine could be trusted to relight in space, clearing the regulatory and technical path to true orbital flights, and that the booster's return logic would protect the launch tower even at the cost of losing the vehicle. The 37-day turnaround signaled that Starship was becoming a cadence machine rather than a series of one-off experiments. Coming five weeks after the first tower catch, it cemented 2024 as the year the largest rocket in history went from spectacle to system, with NASA's Artemis lunar lander contract riding on every iteration.
NASA/Don Pettit (ISS Expedition 72)
Official source
