CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — SpaceX has pulled off its biggest salvage operation yet, recovering its most recently launched Starship from the Indian Ocean.
Elon Musk’s company is now in the process of shipping Starship back to its home base in Texas, a trip expected to take several months. SpaceX shared pictures of the recovery effort near Christmas Island late this week.
Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket in the world — blasted off July 24 from Starbase, Texas. It was the 13th test flight of a full-up Starship, but unlike all the others, it survived the hourlong space-skimming flight and remained floating and intact.
“Congratulations to the entire SpaceX Recovery team for battling through challenging conditions to give our engineers access to a wealth of data to continue rapidly developing Starship,” the company said via X.
Starship is how Musk intends to get people and equipment to Mars, where he hopes to build a city. First up, though, is the moon. NASA is counting on Starship as well as Jeff Bezos' Blue Moon lander to return astronauts to the lunar surface as early as 2028.
President Donald Trump endorsed both destinations during a visit to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston on Friday. He presented the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to each of the four Artemis II astronauts who flew around the moon in April.
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This image provided by SpaceX on Aug. 27, 2026, shows Starship loaded onto a semisubmersible ship to begin the several-month journey back to Starbase. (SpaceX via AP)
This image provided by SpaceX on Aug. 27, 2026, shows engineers inspecting Starship off the coast of Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, following its launch on a test flight back in July. (SpaceX via AP)
This image provided by SpaceX on Aug. 27, 2026, shows engineers inspecting Starship off the coast of Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, following its launch on a test flight back in July. (SpaceX via AP)
NEW YORK (AP) — A federal judge on Friday once again spurned Donald Trump’s effort to erase his hush money conviction, rejecting the president’s bid to move the state court case to federal court and have it dismissed on presidential immunity grounds.
Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein reiterated his earlier finding against Trump, saying that the reasons Trump cited for renewing his request were “neither new nor legally sufficient.”
The judge added: “He has failed to show good cause and diligence.”
It is the third time Hellerstein has blocked Trump from having the U.S. District Court in Manhattan seize control of the case from the New York court where he was tried and convicted.
And, like before, Trump will appeal, according to a spokesperson for his legal team who called Hellerstein's ruling “baseless and lawless.”
“The Supreme Court’s historic decision on Immunity, the Federal and New York State Constitutions, and other established legal precedent mandate that the Witch Hunt perpetrated by the Manhattan DA be removed to federal court, and immediately overturned and dismissed,” a statement issued on behalf of the legal team said. "President Trump will be filing a powerful appeal, and will continue defeating Democrat weaponization at every turn.”
The guilty verdict, reached in May 2024 while Trump was between terms, made him the first former — and now current — U.S. president to be convicted of a crime. Trump is also challenging his conviction through the state court appellate process, which is pending.
Hellerstein’s decision came after a federal appeals court last year ordered him to reconsider his prior denial. The judge previewed his ruling during oral arguments in February, slamming Trump’s lawyers for legal maneuvers that amounted to taking “two bites at the apple.”
State prosecutors did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump was convicted in May 2024 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, whose claim of a sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier had threatened to upend his 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump was sentenced to an unconditional discharge, which left his conviction intact but spared him any punishment. He had long denied Daniels’ claim and said he did nothing wrong. He has sought to get the conviction overturned both by attempting to move the case to federal court and through the appeals process in state court, which is pending.
Hellerstein rejected Trump’s requests to move the case twice before. The first was after Trump’s March 2023 indictment. The second was after Trump’s trial, as his lawyers sought to nix his conviction in the wake of the Supreme Court’s July 2024 ruling that presidents and ex-presidents can’t be prosecuted for official acts and prosecutors can’t use official acts as evidence that unofficial actions were illegal.
Trump appealed Hellerstein’s post-trial ruling and, last November, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the judge to reconsider his decision, finding that he had failed to consider “important issues relevant” to the president’s request to move the case.
A three-judge appellate panel said it expressed no view on how he should rule but instructed Hellerstein to closely review evidence that Trump claimed was related to official acts and whether Trump could argue those actions were taken as part of his White House duties.
The judges also instructed Hellerstein to determine if Trump had “diligently sought” to have the case moved to federal court and whether the case can even be moved to federal court now that Trump has been convicted and sentenced in state court.
During oral arguments in February, Hellerstein took issue with the Trump legal team’s decision-making after the Supreme Court ruling.
Instead of immediately seeking to move the case to federal court, he noted, Trump’s lawyers first asked the trial judge in state court, Juan Merchan, to throw out the verdict on immunity grounds. Normally, such a request must be made within 30 days of an arraignment, but a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. has ruled that exceptions can be made if “good cause” is shown.
Trump, a Republican, did not attend the arguments.
Trump lawyer Jeffrey Wall argued that prosecutors rushed to trial instead of waiting for the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision and that Trump’s legal team was crunched for time after the high court’s ruling because his sentencing was scheduled for just 10 days later.
Trump’s lawyers did not ask Hellerstein to intervene until nearly two months later, while their request to Merchan was still pending. The judge called that a “strategic decision” and suggested that by going to the state court first, Trump’s lawyers cost him the right to pursue remedies in federal court.
“No, your honor,” Wall replied. “It is what any sensible litigant would do” in that situation.
“Not so,” Hellerstein replied.
“That is a decision on your part,” the judge added. “You didn’t have to do that. You could have come right to the federal court. Just by filing a notice of removal, there would be no sentencing.”
Trump’s lawyers “made a choice,” Hellerstein said, “and you sought two bites at the apple.”
In his written ruling Friday, Hellerstein said Trump was asking for a “'second bite at the apple,' a result the law disfavors.”
The judge added that “Trump’s delay in filing for removal constitutes a ‘quintessential strategic decision,’ and the ‘fact that he later came to view that decision as a poor one is not sufficient, by itself, to establish cause.’”
President Donald Trump speaks during an event to present the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to Artemis II crew members, Friday, Aug. 28, 2026, at Johnson Space Center in Houston. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
