SpaceX has recovered its most recently launched Starship from the Indian Ocean, an feat that marks the company’s biggest salvage operation yet.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is now in the process of shipping Starship back to its home base in Texas, a trip expected to take several months. The company shared pictures of the recovery effort near Christmas Island late last week.
Starship, which is the biggest and most powerful rocket in the world, blasted off July 24 from Starbase in Texas. It was the 13th test flight of a full-up Starship, but unlike all the others, it survived the hourlong space-skimming flight and remained floating and intact.
Announcing the operation in a post on X, the company wrote: “Congratulations to the entire SpaceX Recovery team for battling through challenging conditions to give our engineers access to a wealth of data to continue rapidly developing Starship!”
Starship is Musk project aimed at getting people and equipment to Mars, where he hopes to build a city. First up, though, is the moon. NASA is counting on Starship as well as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Moon lander to return astronauts to the lunar surface as early as 2028.
President Donald Trump endorsed both destinations during a visit to NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston on Friday. He presented the Congressional Space Medal of Honour to each of the four Artemis II astronauts who flew around the moon in April. (AP)
