President-elect Donald Trump traveled to Texas on Tuesday to join Elon Musk to watch SpaceX’s sixth launch of its Starship super-heavy reusable rocket program.
“Good luck to Elon Musk and the Great Patriots involved in this incredible project,” Trump said in a Truth Social post, while en route to Texas.
The roughly 400-foot-tall rocket system, designed to land astronauts on the moon and ferry crews to Mars, lifted off at 4 p.m. CT from SpaceX’s sprawling rocket development site in Boca Chica, Texas.
The first stage, called Super Heavy, made a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico instead of attempting to return to its launchpad, which was done out of safety precautions due to conditions being unfavorable for a landing.
“Distinct vehicle and pad criteria must be met prior to a return and catch of the Super Heavy booster, which will require healthy systems on the booster and tower and a final manual command from the mission’s Flight Director,” said SpaceX in its announcement for Starship 6.
A live stream separate from SpaceX’s and hosted by space blogger Everyday Astronaut showed the Super Heavy booster exploding into a massive fireball on the Gulf horizon after splashing down.
Starship last month demonstrated the novel catch-landing method for the first time, achieving a key milestone in its reusable design. Tuesday’s catch-landing was supposed to be “faster/harder,” Musk had written on social media before the launch.
The rest of the mission appeared successful.
In space, Starship traveled around Earth for a daytime splashdown in the Indian Ocean roughly an hour later. It reignited one of its onboard engines in space for the first time, an early test of its maneuverability in space that SpaceX had tried but failed to do in past flights.
Late in the presidential campaign, President Trump recalled the story of how he was blown away while watching SpaceX’s historic landing of Starship 5, which ended with the chopsticks successfully catching the massive rocket as it descended toward the earth.
Trump said he called Elon right away and inquired if any other countries have the capability to accomplish such a feat, to which Musk told him they did not.
SpaceX said after that “Starship’s fifth flight test was a seminal moment in iterating towards a fully and rapidly reusable launch system.”
Trump and Musk have grown closer in recent weeks, with the tech billionaire advising the incoming president on multiple issues, particularly in the industry of electric vehicles and renewable energy, in which Musk holds a dominant market share.
The two men have been photographed at Mar-a-Lago extensively. They were even seen sitting next to each other at Saturday night’s UFC 309 event at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where Trump received a warm welcome from the crowd as he returned to the site of one of his final campaign rallies last month.
Last week, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy were announced as co-commissioners of the Department of Government Efficiency, a newly proposed federal commission whose aim is to cut any and all non-essential government programs by July 4, 2026, which will be the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.
Reports had emerged earlier in the day that the Federal Aviation Administration had restricted airspace over the Texan towns of Boca Chica and Brownsville, which led to media reports of speculation that Trump would be attending the Starship 6 launch in some capacity.
Trump will be inaugurated for his second term on Jan. 20, 2025.
Reuters contributed to this report.