SpaceX retrieves Starship from Indian Ocean, begins long voyage home

SpaceX has completed its most ambitious recovery mission to date, retrieving its latest Starship prototype from the Indian Ocean. The company released images of the salvage operation near Christmas Island this week, confirming that the massive vehicle is now being transported back to its home base in Texas — a journey expected to take several months.

The recovered Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket, launched from Starbase, Texas, on July 24. This marked the 13th full-scale test flight of the vehicle. Unlike previous attempts, this one survived its hour-long suborbital trajectory and remained floating and structurally intact after splashdown.

In a statement on X, SpaceX congratulated its recovery team for "battling through challenging conditions" to recover the vehicle, which will provide engineers with valuable data to accelerate Starship's development.

Starship is central to Elon Musk's plans for Mars colonization. Before that, however, the vehicle is slated for lunar missions. NASA is relying on Starship, alongside Jeff Bezos' Blue Moon lander, to return astronauts to the Moon as early as 2028.

President Donald Trump endorsed both lunar and Martian ambitions during a visit to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston on Friday, where he also presented the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the four Artemis II astronauts who completed a lunar flyby in April.