There was no so-called booster catch during SpaceX's sixth Starship test flight on Tuesday, and some more details are now trickling out on that. A SpaceX spokesman didn't initially explain what went wrong with the plan, in which the Super Heavy booster was meant to be caught by the launch tower's mechanical arms, nicknamed "chopsticks," as had been successfully done in an October test flight. Dan Hout would only say that not all of the criteria for a booster catch was met, per the AP. Instead, the booster crashed into the Gulf of Mexico just minutes after being sent skyward.
As the booster was steering itself back to the launch tower that SpaceX chief Elon Musk calls "Mechazilla," "automated health checks of critical hardware on the launch and catch tower triggered an abort of the catch attempt," SpaceX now says in a statement. The booster then "executed a preplanned divert maneuver, performing a landing burn and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico." Greg Autry, associate provost for space commercialization and strategy at the University of Central Florida, tells CNN that SpaceX may have simply acted out of an "abundance of caution," as both Musk and President-elect Trump were in attendance for the launch.
"I don't know what the decision-making process was," Autry said. "Maybe they just want to be careful not to kill the president-elect of the United States." Space.com notes that, despite the chopsticks fail, the flight did achieve some important feats—specifically, the inclusion of its first-ever payload, in the form of a stuffed banana that served as an indicator of zero gravity. Starship also managed to relight one of its six Raptor engines during its hourlong flight and test tweaks to the spacecraft's heat shield. (More SpaceX stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
