Donald Trump went to Texas to watch a spaceship launch tower catch a moving rocket booster with the tenderness of a parent cradling their newborn baby, but all he got instead was 33 rocket engines crashing into the ocean.
On Tuesday, the president-elect joined his campaign donor turned government efficiency advisor Elon Musk to watch his private rocket company SpaceX’s latest test flight of the Starship vehicle system.
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The NASA contractor planned to attempt a repeat of an incredible maneuver in which giant mechanical arms sticking out of the launch tower “catch” a rocket booster mid-air as it blasts back down to Earth.
The booster’s engines provide the thrust to push the flight vehicle into its path, separating from the rest of the spacecraft after the engines are done firing.
After SpaceX pulled of the admittedly impressive catch for the first time in October, Trump praised Musk as a “super-genius” and marveled that the arms caught the rocket “just like you hold your little baby at night.”
But just four minutes into Tuesday’s launch, the mission director called off the catch and ordered the booster to crash into the Gulf of Mexico, the Financial Times reported. SpaceX hasn’t said yet what motivated the call.
About 35 minutes later, Trump did get a consolation prize when engineers reignited an engine in space for the first time. But it was nothing compared to the sight of a column of fire hurtling backwards toward a launch tower, only to be enveloped in giant moving metal arms.
Standing almost 400 feet tall, Starship is the most powerful rocket ever built, with an estimated price tag of $100 million per flight, according to the Financial Times. Making the boosters reusable has been a key part of SpaceX’s efforts to cut the cost of each Starship flight in half.
Trump, who has a fascination with space travel, attended the launch with several Republican members of Congress and was surprisingly quiet afterward, posting just a blurry picture to his social media platform Truth Social showing the back of his head while the rocket takes off.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, on the other hand, was more effusive.
“Congrats to SpaceX on Starship’s sixth test flight,” he wrote in a post on X. “Exciting to see the Raptor engine restart in space—major progress towards orbital flight.”
Starship’s success is NASA’s success, he added.
“Together, we will return humanity to the Moon and set our sights on Mars,” he wrote.
