Though Saturday’s Starship recovery is a key milestone in that effort, SpaceX has yet to recover both Starship stages in a single mission, which would mark the first-ever return of an orbital launch system.
And Starship’s heat shield, composed of hundreds of black hexagonal tiles that protect it from the blazing heat of atmospheric reentry, is itself not yet fully reusable.
SpaceX is trying to engineer new tile designs that will require little to no refurbishment after each mission.
NASA’s Space Shuttle system that ferried astronauts to the International Space Station before its 2011 retirement was partially reusable; its external fuel tanks that got it off Earth were discarded after each flight. The reusable spacecraft itself had to go through extensive refurbishment before re-flying.
SpaceX has spent more than US$15 billion on Starship’s development. NASA has provided US$3.2 billion as part of a contract valued at more than US$4 billion that SpaceX won in 2021 to return humans to the moon using Starship under the space agency’s Artemis program.
NASA expects Starship, along with another moon lander under development by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, to start crewed flights to the moon in 2028, though several challenging development milestones remain with both mooncraft.
For Starship, those milestones include demonstrating complex fuel transfers between Starship tanker rockets in orbit, a critical process that will enable the ship to travel beyond Earth’s orbit to the moon.