Elon Musk’s SpaceX reached a significant milestone on Sunday by catching the massive booster stage from its launched Starship rocket in a pair of metal robotic arms as it fell back to the company’s southern Texas launchpad. The historic feat, which drew praise from space experts and astronauts, topped a successful fifth test flight for the uncrewed Starship, which blasted off at 7.25am local time (1325 BST) on Sunday from the Boca Chica starbase. As the rocket’s 233ft (71-metre) Super Heavy booster separated 65km (40 miles) above the Earth, the upper stage pushed on to a higher altitude of nearly 90 miles, looping around our planet at 17,000 mph before splashing down in the Indian Ocean as per the plan.

SpaceX staff erupted in applause and cheers as the falling booster reignited three of its Raptor engines, decelerated its rapid descent and swung towards the “mechazilla” launch tower, where it was caught by the mechanical arms, labelled “chopsticks”. It is for the very first time SpaceX has attempted the bold manoeuvre, one it sees as critical for its goal of developing fully reusable rockets capable of transporting humans, scientific equipment and supplies to the moon and onwards to Mars.

“Are you kidding me?” said Dan Huot (SpaceX’s communications manager), who was simply left shaking at the spectacle. “What we just saw, that looked like magic.” “This is a day for the engineering history books,” added Kate Tice (a quality systems engineer at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California).

The rest of Starship re-entered atmosphere of the Earth horizontally, with onboard cameras showing a smooth, pinkish-purple plasma covering the ship’s Earth-facing side. The ship’s hot side is covered with 18,000 heat-shielding tiles that were upgraded since SpaceX’s last test in June, when Starship accomplished its first full test flight to the Indian Ocean but suffered tile damage that made its re-entry hard. This time around, Starship appeared far more intact upon reigniting one of its six engines to position itself upright for the ocean landing. The SpaceX live stream exhibited the rocket splashing down in the night-time waters off Australia’s coast, then toppling on its side, concluding its test mission.

A distinct camera view from a vessel near the splashdown site then showed the ship exploding into a vast fireball. It was unclear whether the explosion was a controlled one or the resultant of a fuel leak. Musk stated the ship landed “precisely on target!” Commenting on SpaceX’s successful capture of the Starship booster, Chris Hadfield (a Canadian former astronaut) wrote on X: “There was an enormous step forward in human capability today. Makes me even more excited for our collective future. Congratulations to all at SpaceX!”