Elon Musk's SpaceX aborts booster recovery due to technical issues

Speaking of Elon Musk, his SpaceX is in the midst of a 15th test flight of its Starship rocket. They'd been hoping to pull off the first ever double catch, with both the booster and the ship itself coming safely back down to Earth. Instead, an unspecified problem forced the company to abort recovery of the booster, which was diverted from its return flight path and crashed down into the Gulf of Mexico. They're still hoping to pull off their first ever catch of the spaceship itself, though, as it returns to Earth this Saturday. For more, we can cross to Frédéric Castel, who's in Boca Chica, Texas, where the launch took place. He joins us by phone. Frédéric, it sounds like this was a partial success. Walk us through what happened and what's still to come. So it was a partial success in the meaning that there was a perfect launch. All the engines worked perfectly, but six minutes after the separation of the first stage and the second stage, the first huge stage, which is 72 meters long, when it was about to land back at At, at, at the, the, the, at. its launch pad, it couldn't make it. Obviously, it's because of a problem of navigation and guidance system. Put it off the coast to be sure that it wouldn't be over the population in the area of South Texas or Mexico. And at that point, they blew it up on purpose just before arriving, landing on the sea. So they lost this first step. But the most important thing is, of course, for the first time after 15 missions to test. The second stage, which is on orbit right now, we're about eight hours into the mission. And in 22 hours, in Paris time, it would be tonight around 10, 20. Local time, we would have an attempt to land back the second stage. And that's very much more difficult because it comes from orbit. So it's a very high speed and the re-entry is quite difficult. So hopefully they will make it. In the meantime, it was successful because they deployed 26 satellite, Starlink satellite, very powerful, version 3, which is extremely powerful, of 2 tons, and that worked perfectly. And just a few minutes ago, SpaceX confirmed that the protection, the thermal protection of this huge... And Frederic, can you remind us of the bigger picture here? I mean, what is SpaceX hoping to achieve long term? It's a problem because there is a schedule for the moon program called Artemis, where the same kind of spaceship is expected to land on the moon by 2028. So there are obviously a lot of progress, but it's much... All right. Well, we will be keeping a close eye on how things go later this Saturday. Frédéric, thank you so much for those updates. That's Frédéric Castel reporting there from Boca Chica, Texas.