SpaceX Aces Starship 6th Test Flight, Fails To Catch Booster

New Delhi: Billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX has successfully aced the sixth test flight of its huge Starship rocket early on Wednesday. However, it failed to repeat the “booster catch”.

The huge 30-foot-wide, 397-foot-tall rocket blasted off from SpaceX’s Starbase facility near Boca Chica Beach in South Texas at 5:00 p.m. EST (3.30 IST), where US President-elect Donald Trump was also present.

The fifth test flight, last month, made a historical catch of the booster with the “chopstick arms”. However, during the sixth flight, the catch was called off just four minutes into the test flight for unspecified reasons. It was directed to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

"We tripped a commit criteria," SpaceX's Dan Huot said during the webcast.

Meanwhile, SpaceX announced that for the first time “Starship successfully ignited one of its Raptor engines while in space”.