SpaceX's recovered Starship 40 will take months to get back to Texas

SpaceX’s rocket traveled thousands of miles from Texas to the Indian Ocean for a launch test. For several reasons, it’ll take a lot longer to return home. SpaceX’s recovered Starship 40 will take months to get back to Texas.

Tomorrow Space SpaceX’s recovered Starship 40 will take months to get back to Texas The rocket spent 24 days at sea before recovery efforts began. Its journey home is, well, slightly slower: The company says it will take several months. Starship 40 launched from SpaceX’s Starbase in South Texas on July 24.

The spacecraft deployed 20 Starlink V3 satellites during its roughly 65-minute flight. This was a suborbital mission, and after briefly linking up with SpaceX’s network, the satellites reentered and burned up about 20 minutes after deployment. That was the intended result as it wasn’t an operational satellite launch.

Instead, it was designed to test Starship’s payload deployment system (among other things) as SpaceX inches toward a fully reusable launch system. What came as a surprise was that, unlike previous Starship upper stages, Starship 40 survived its splashdown intact.