The third time’s a charm, as the saying goes. SpaceX has been able to achieve a perfect soft landing of the Starship rocket prototype, and it did so on the third attempt. SN10 has made its way into the history books.
The previous two attempts saw the SN8 and SN9 prototypes crash upon landing due to the speed of the approach to the landing pad, but the missions were still deemed a success. SN8 showed that the belly flop maneuver worked in real life, not just in computer simulations, and SN9 validated the sequence, performing it flawlessly, except for the landing part.
SN10 also took off at the test facility in Boca Chica, Texas, and flew to 10 km (6,200 miles) altitude. The three Raptor engines shut off in progression, with the last one easing the rocket into the belly flop free-fall. Some six minutes into the flight, as SN10 approached the landing pad, the engines went back online, and the rocket was able to perform an impeccable soft landing.
You can see the entire flight in the SpaceX video at the bottom of the page. With the rocket back on the landing pad, the commentator noted how this was a historical achievement and the first concrete step towards space travel by means of reusable rockets–and the colonization of Mars.
What the video does not show because the feed cut off after a couple of minutes is that SN10 suffered the same fate as its under-achieving siblings: it exploded. Several minutes after the landing, presumably due to the damage to the rocket and/or engines during the flight, the prototype exploded. You can see that in the second video.
The explosion doesn’t take anything away from the launch's importance: here is the first SpaceX rocket prototype able to make a soft landing, which paves the way for space exploration by reusable rockets. Each blown-up prototype has served to offer important data to engineers on what needed to be changed or improved for the next one, and now that the rocket was able to land on its own, the sky’s the limit. Literally so.
Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends. Full profile
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