With President-elect Trump and Elon Musk looking on, the sixth Starship test flight took off Tuesday from SpaceX's launch site in southern Texas. The Super Heavy booster splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico minutes after the 5pm Eastern launch, the reports. SpaceX had initially planned to catch the booster with the launch tower's giant mechanical "chopsticks," as it did during a .
"We did mention that we're constantly evaluating the criteria for catch. There's a lot of things that need to go well in order to line that up," a SpaceX commentator said, per . "Unfortunately, today we will forgo booster catch.
" The catch was called off four minutes into the flight, the reports. The top half of Starship splashed down in the Indian Ocean around an hour after launch. The upper stage appeared to split into two halves and SpaceX does not expect to recover them, the reports.
Starship lights up its six engines after separating from the booster, and the test flight included an attempt to fire up one of the engines for a second time, reports. "This is really important, something they haven't done before," says former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman. "They're finicky little beasts, and it's not so easy to light them up and shut them down and light them up again," Reisman, a SpaceX consultant, tells CNN.
In another test, thermal shielding was removed from some parts of the spacecraft to see if catch mechanisms could be placed there in future flights. "I'm heading to the Great State of Texas to.