SpaceX pulled off its boldest test flight yet of the enormous Starship rocket on Sunday, catching the returning booster back at the launch pad with mechanical arms.
Towering almost 121 metres tall, the empty Starship blasted off at sunrise from the southern tip of Texas near the US-Mexican border.
It arced over the Gulf of Mexico like the four Starships before it that ended up being destroyed, either soon after lift-off or while ditching into the sea.
The last one in June was the most successful yet, completing its flight without exploding.
This time, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk upped the challenge and risk.
The company brought the first-stage booster back to land at the pad from which it had soared seven minutes earlier.
The launch tower, dubbed "Mechazilla" on SpaceX's social media, sported monstrous mechanical arms that caught the descending 71-metre-long booster.
"The tower has caught the rocket!!" Mr Musk said on X.
Company employees screamed in joy as the booster slowly lowered itself into the launch tower's arms.
"Even in this day and age, what we just saw is magic," SpaceX's Dan Huot observed from near the launch site.
"I am shaking right now."
"Folks, this is a day for the engineering history books," added SpaceX's Kate Tice from the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
SpaceX's Starship rocket lifts off for the test flight. (AP Photo: Eric Gay)
It was up to the flight director to decide, in real time with a manual control, whether to attempt the landing.
SpaceX said both the booster and launch tower had to be in good, stable condition. Otherwise, it was going to end up in the gulf like the previous ones.
Everything was judged to be ready for the catch.
The retro-looking stainless steel spacecraft on top continued around the world once free of the booster, before executing a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean, where it would safely sink.
The entire flight lasted just over an hour.
SpaceX has been recovering the first-stage boosters of its smaller Falcon 9 rockets for nine years, after delivering satellites and crews to orbit from Florida or California.
But they land on floating ocean platforms or on concrete slabs several miles from their launch pads — not back on their place of departure.
Recycling Falcon boosters has sped up the launch rate and saved SpaceX millions. Musk intends to do the same for Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, with 33 methane-fuel engines on the booster alone.
NASA has ordered two Starships to land astronauts on the moon later this decade.
SpaceX intends to use Starship to send people and supplies to the moon and, eventually Mars.
AP