SpaceX has flown the full Starship rocket system on four spaceflight tests so far, with launches in April and November last year and March and June this year. Each of the test flights achieved more milestones than the last.

The company's rocket successfully completed a flight test for the first time during the June flight, when Starship landed in the Indian Ocean after surviving the powerful forces of atmospheric re-entry. Additionally, the rocket's carrier returns in one piece to conduct a controlled landing in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Starship system is fully reusable and is intended to become a new method for transporting cargo and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also crucial to NASA's plan to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX received a multi-billion dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a manned lunar lander as part of NASA's Artemis lunar program.

Company leadership said SpaceX expects to fly hundreds of Starship missions before the rocket launches with a crew.

SpaceX emphasizes that its approach to developing the giant rocket is trying to “build on what we have learned from previous flights.”

But the company wanted to launch the fifth flight earlier than October, leading both SpaceX and Musk to be vocal in their criticism of the FAA, saying “unnecessary environmental analysis” would delay the process.

While the FAA and partner agencies at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Commerce Department's National Marine Fisheries Service completed the assessments faster than expected, SpaceX also had to pay fines to environmental regulators for unauthorized water discharges at its launch site in Texas.

With the booster catch, SpaceX has exceeded the milestones of the fourth test flight.

The company achieved its goal of returning the booster to the launch site and catching the vehicle using the “chopstick” arms on the tower. The company sees the ambitious capture approach as crucial to its goal of making the rocket fully reusable.

“SpaceX engineers have spent years preparing and months of testing for the booster capture test, with technicians putting tens of thousands of hours into building the infrastructure to maximize our chances of success,” the company wrote on its website.

The catch requires thousands of criteria to be met, the company explained. Had it not been ready, the launch vehicle would have deviated from the return trajectory and instead splashed onto the ground off the coast in the Gulf of Mexico.

“We will not accept compromises when it comes to ensuring the safety of the public and our team, and return will only be attempted if the conditions are right,” SpaceX said.

Starship is both the tallest and most powerful rocket ever launched. Fully loaded on the super-heavy booster, Starship stands 397 feet tall and is approximately 30 feet in diameter.

The rocket's journey into space begins with the Super Heavy booster, which is 232 feet high. At its base are 33 Raptor engines that together produce 16.7 million pounds of thrust — about double the 8.8 million pounds of thrust from NASA's Space Launch System rocket, which launched for the first time in 2022.

The 165-foot-tall spacecraft itself has six Raptor engines – three for use in Earth's atmosphere and three for operation in the vacuum of space.

The rocket is powered by liquid oxygen and liquid methane. It takes more than 10 million pounds of fuel to launch the entire system.