Watching Starship come back to Earth last week was perhaps even more exciting than seeing it rise off the pad.The flight plan called for both of Starship's stages — the Super Heavy first-stage booster and the 165-foot-tall upper stage, called Starship, or just Ship — to steer themselves back tofor ocean splashdowns. Super Heavy was supposed to come down in the Gulf of Mexico, and Ship targeted the Indian Ocean.
If you can't see SpaceX's Starship in person, you can score a model of your own. Standing at 13.77 inches , this is a 1:375 ratio of SpaceX's Starship as a desktop model. The materials here are alloy steel and it weighs just 225g.The Super Heavy booster of SpaceX's Starship megarocket comes back to Earth for an ocean splashdown shortly after launching on June 6, 2024..
Super Heavy looked to be more or less intact, which you couldn't quite say for Ship. The upper stage went much higher, faster and farther than Super Heavy, so its reentry was more fiery and dramatic. It lost many heat-shield tiles, for example, and one of its flaps nearly burned through from frictional heating, but Ship managed to hold together until it hit the water.Starship's performance has improved on each of its four test flights, all of which have occurred in the past 14 months.
SpaceX is gearing up for the fifth launch of Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. But we may have already seen the last Super Heavy ocean splashdown; shortly after the June 6 launch, SpaceX founder and CEOto keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: and joined the team in 2010.
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