Starship Flight 7 — second successful booster catch

Sixteen January 2025 was already a historic date by sunrise, when Blue Origin's New Glenn reached orbit from Florida. That afternoon at 4:37 p.m. Central time, SpaceX answered from the other side of the Gulf. The tallest rocket ever flown, a roughly 123-metre stack topped by Ship 33, the first of the stretched Block 2 Starships, climbed away from Starbase on the thrust of 33 Raptor engines while crowds lined the South Texas dunes.

Seven minutes later came the spectacle SpaceX had only managed once before. Booster 14 flipped, burned back toward the coast, and slid between the launch tower's 'chopstick' arms, which closed around it mid-air. The catch, first achieved on Flight 5 in October 2024, was now repeatable. Engineers had treated that first catch as a possible fluke; the second proved the architecture, a rocket the height of a 20-storey building returning to its own launch mount.

Then the day turned. Ship 33, carrying ten Starlink simulators for the program's first payload-deployment demonstration, began losing engines. Contact dropped roughly eight and a half minutes into flight. SpaceX later traced the failure to a harmonic vibration several times stronger in flight than in testing, which strained the propulsion system, leaked propellant into the unpressurised 'attic' above the engine firewall, and fed sustained fires until the ship broke apart.

The debris fell along the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands, where residents filmed glowing fragments streaking overhead at dusk. The FAA activated a debris response area, and dozens of airliners were diverted or delayed around the splash zone. No one was hurt, but the episode put the public-safety stakes of rapid-iteration rocketry in front of a global audience, and it opened a bruising year for Starship's upper stage even as booster recovery became routine.