The biggest and most powerful rocket ever built launched today for the fifth time — and then returned to its launch pad and was caught by a pair of giant chopsticks.

SpaceX launched its 400-foot-tall (122 meters) Starship vehicle for the fifth time ever today (Oct. 13), sending the giant rocket aloft from its Starbase site in South Texas at 8:25 am. EDT (1225 GMT; 7:25 a.m. local Texas time). 

The mission aimed to break new ground for Starship, and for spaceflight in general: SpaceX planned to return Starship’s huge first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, directly to its launch mount, catching it with the “chopstick” arms of the launch tower in a bold and unprecedented maneuver.  And that’s exactly what happened. About seven minutes after liftoff, SpaceX’s Super Heavy executed what appeared to be a bull’s-eye landing, hovering near the Mechazilla launch tower as the tower captured it with its metal arms. 

I swear this is as sci-fi geeky as it gets. The science it took to figure this out is astonishing, and then they go naming the launch facility after a cheesy kaiju from the 1960’s.

“This is a day for the engineering history books,” Kate Tice, SpaceX manager of Quality Systems Engineering, said during live commentary as SpaceX employees screamed and cheered at the company’s Hawthorne, California headquarters behind her. “This is absolutely insane! On the first-ever attempt, we have successfully caught the Super Heavy booster back at the launch tower.”

“Are you kidding me?” SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot added from the launch site. “Even in this day and age, what we just saw — that looked like magic.”

The booster catch was not the only goal for Flight 5. SpaceX also aimed to send Starship’s 165-foot-tall (50 m) upper stage — known as Starship, or simply Ship — to space and bring it back to Earth with a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. That occurred about 65 minutes after liftoff, with the Ship managing to fire three of its six engines to hover over the ocean before tipping over and exploding. They hadn’t actually expected to retrieve any part of the Starship itself, so hovering over the ocean before it underwent its rapid uncheduled dissassembly was the conclusion of its expected life span.

SpaceX is developing Starship to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other exploration feats. The vehicle is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable (as evidenced by the Super Heavy launch-mount landing plan, which will slash the time needed between flights). This characteristic, combined with Starship’s unprecedented power, could revolutionize spaceflight, according to the company and Musk.

SpaceX aims to get Starship up and running in time to meet such deadlines via its usual development strategy — tweaking the vehicle and testing those tweaks on test flights, then repeating the process. Indeed, the Flight 5 Starship featured some significant modifications compared to its predecessors.

“One of the key upgrades on Starship ahead of flight was a complete rework of its heat shield, with SpaceX technicians spending more than 12,000 hours replacing the entire thermal protection system with newer-generation tiles, a backup ablative layer and additional protections between the flap structures,” SpaceX wrote in a Flight 5 mission description.

Starship’s previous four test flights occurred in April and November of 2023 and March and June of this year.

The rocket has performed better on each successive flight. The debut mission lasted just four minutes, for example; SpaceX ordered a detonation high in the Texas sky after Starship’s two stages failed to separate. But Flight 4, which launched on June 6, was a complete success; Starship reached orbital velocity, and both it and Super Heavy survived their return to Earth, landing in their designated landing zones..

If it were up to SpaceX, Flight 5 likely would’ve been in the books two months ago; the company said that Starship was ready to go from a technical standpoint in early August. 

Launches require approval from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), however, and the agency needed more time before greenlighting this one. Indeed, last month, the FAA said that it didn’t expect approval for Flight 5 to come before late November.