Incredible photos showed Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship perform its breakthrough “belly flop” maneuver as it splashed down in the Indian Ocean Sunday morning. And that wasn’t even the coolest part of the test flight.
The perfectly executed landing followed the Starship’s 232-foot Falcon Super Heavy booster rocket gracefully returning to the launchpad seven minutes after launch, where it was “caught” by a pair of enormous mechanical arms nicknamed “Mechazilla.”
The successful test flight, which took off at sunrise at SpaceX’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, represented an engineering first and provided a glimpse into the future of space travel, starting with a pair of manned NASA missions to the moon in 2026.
“The tower has caught the rocket!!” Musk triumphantly wrote on X. “Science fiction without the fiction part.”
SpaceX engineers were also ecstatic about the historic landing, and didn’t hold back on social media.
“I couldn’t say this on air but HOLY S–T,” wrote SpaceX’s Kate Tice on the Musk-owned platform in a post sharing a video of the launch.
“I am crying right now,” wrote the company’s Dan Huot.
Sunday’s flight was the fifth test launch of the nearly 400-foot Starship rocket, which the company says it plans to use to ferry supplies as well as astronauts to the moon and, one day, Mars.
The four previous test flights — the most recent one in June — saw both parts of the spacecraft destoryed after liftoff or while completing the water landing.
