Donald Trump joined Elon Musk in Texas on Tuesday to attend a successful test launch of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, demonstrating the unprecedented bond between the world’s richest man and the newly elected President of the United States.
Trump tweeted ahead of the launch: “I’m going to the Great State of Texas to see the launch of the largest object ever lifted, not just into space, but simply by lifting it off the ground. Good luck to @ElonMusk and the Great Patriots involved in this incredible project!”
Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, said he was “honored” that Trump was present at the launch. Texas Senator Ted Cruz was also in attendance.
After the rocket took off, he returned his first stage booster to Earth. SpaceX refrained from returning the booster to the launch site, as was accomplished after a launch last month in a dramatic recapture, opting instead for a fiery splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
No reason was immediately given for the setback, but Starship’s upper stage achieved the mission’s primary goal: a long suborbital flight to evaluate hardware and software upgrades from previous flights this year.
Related: SpaceX launches Starship rocket and captures booster in giant metal arms
Trump will soon be tasked with making very consequential decisions about the future of American space travel. SpaceX already benefits from billions of dollars in US government contracts, and is poised to acquire even more. The company’s Falcon rockets and Dragon capsules provide NASA’s only crew craft for flights to the International Space Station, and the Starship landing system was chosen to return humans to the moon, a mission currently scheduled for 2026.
With Musk almost inseparable from Trump since the election, calling himself the “First Buddy” and reportedly enjoying outsized influence in shaping the Republican’s second term, their joint appearance at SpaceX’s Starbase complex in Boca Chica for the 5pm ET launch attempt of Starship’s sixth test flight is more than just mutual cheerleading.
Tuesday’s planned launch was Starship’s sixth experimental flight, following closely on the heels of its first fully successful test in June, when it reached an altitude of nearly 130 miles (210 kilometers) and orbited Earth before landing intact in the Indian Ocean crashed. A fifth flight last month provided the spectacle of capturing Starship’s recyclable first-stage rocket booster at the Texas launch site in a pair of giant calipers known as chopsticks.
SpaceX was unable to repeat the shot during Flight 6 on Tuesday and announced in a tweet that it would instead send the booster to a water splash in the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX plans to launch future Starship test missions almost monthly. With a thrust of about 16 million pounds and a capacity to lift up to 165 tons from the Earth’s surface, Starship is nearly twice as powerful as the Saturn V rockets that sent twelve astronauts to the moon between 1969 and 1972.
Trump has yet to decide who he wants to be NASA’s next administrator as the agency approaches a pivotal moment in its history, and with Musk insisting he can get humans to Mars within four years, government support, and more specifically dollars, will be crucial are. . Furthermore, as speculation mounts that NASA is considering abandoning its own Space Launch System rocket program under the Trump administration, and relying more on the private sector for its return to the lunar surface and future missions to Mars, Musk could be making an even stronger hand can come forward. .
“The founder of this century’s most innovative space company, Elon Musk, successfully used his fortune, time and energy to help elect Donald Trump president of the United States,” Eric Berger, senior space editor of Ars Technica, wrote this month. “It is entirely possible that the incumbent CEO of SpaceX could be the country’s top adviser on space policy, conflict be damned.”
Trump, meanwhile, has made no secret of his desire to see humans achieve the highly ambitious goal of reaching Mars during his second term, and he would reportedly like to see for himself the progress made on what is the world’s most powerful rocket when fully configured.
