It was the first time SpaceX launched its massive Starship, returned the booster to the launch site, and caught it with a pair of oversize "chopsticks.".

That test flight – the fifth in the Starship development program – occurred Sunday morning at the company's Starbase site in southeast Texas. The nearly 400-foot-tall Starship is at the centerpiece of SpaceX's stated ambition to make life multi-planetary, but more immediately NASA's ambitious Artemis campaign to return humans to the surface of the moon.

This would mean high reusability of the entire Starship vehicle, which includes an upper stage, also called Starship, and a Super Heavy booster. But that means proving out the capability to recover both stages and refurbish them in short order for reuse on future flights.

And so, it came as little surprise that the primary goals for the fifth flight test were two fold: it marked the first time that the Super Heavy booster has ever been "caught" at the launch site, as well as a successful reentry and splash-down of Starship in the Indian Ocean.

The latter was done: on the final test flight in June, SpaceX successfully completed a controlled re-entry and splashdown of the Starship upper stage. However, the booster catch, as the company encapsulated it in a blog post, would be "singularly novel" in the history of rocketry.

The closest analogy is the now-familiar landings of Falcon 9 boosters on autonomous barges and at terrestrial landing zones. During today's launch, the booster throtled to hover and gently positioned itself in the zone of two "chopstick" arms attached to the launch tower. Those arms then closed over the booster and hold it up after its engines stop firing.

You can catch a glimpse of the catch around 40 minutes into SpaceX's video of the test. After the booster detaches and Starship is caught, it continues to rise to orbit before splashing in the Indian Ocean and exploding (SpaceX had not intended to recover the spacecraft).

Thousands of criteria showing healthy systems across the vehicle and pad had to be met for the catch attempt to occur, update posted on SpaceX's website said. This test also happened a bit sooner than was anticipated. The Federal Aviation Administration said it did not expect to issue a modified launch license for this test before late November.

That schedule came much to SpaceX's umbrage, leading the company regularly to pen what it called the regulator's inefficiency. But the FAA announced Saturday it has cleared for liftoff.

The FAA said it deemed SpaceX met all safety, environmental and other licensing requirements for the suborbital test flight, the regulator said in a statement. Notably, the authorization also includes approval for the next test flight, given that "the changes requested by SpaceX for Flight 6 are within the scope of what has been previously analyzed," the FAA said.

In the meantime, SpaceX's engineers have been kept quite busy. Over the past months, they have conducted several tests on the launch tower, replaced the entire thermal protection system of the rocket with newer tiles and a backup ablative layer, and upgraded the ship's software in anticipation of its return to the atmosphere. Engineers completed propellant loading tests and launch pad water deluge system testing, meant to protect the pad from the potent fire generated by the 33 Raptor engines powering the booster, this week.

The firm will eventually recover the Starship upper stage to the landing site as well, but we'll have to wait to see that play out in future test launches.

With each flight building on learnings from the last, testing improvements in hardware and operations across every facet of Starship, we're on the cusp of demonstrating techniques fundamental to Starship's fully and rapidly reusable design, said the company. "By continuing to push our hardware in a flight environment, and doing so as safely and as frequently as possible, we'll rapidly bring Starship online and revolutionize humanity's ability to access space.".

Anthony Ha for this story, updated to include news of a test flight into space with a successful outcome.