SpaceX successfully “caught” the first stage booster of its Starship megarocket on Sunday when it returned to the launch pad after a test flight, a world first in the company’s pursuit of rapid reusability.
The “Super Heavy Booster” attached to the Starship rocket a few minutes earlier, then made a picture-perfect controlled return to the same pad in Texas, where a pair of giant mechanical “chopsticks” reached out from the launch tower. The slowly descending booster has stopped, according to a livestream from Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.
“Folks, this is a day for the engineering history books,” a SpaceX spokesperson said in voiceover on the company’s livestream, as the booster was safely in the tower’s hold and company employees cheered.
“The tower has caught the rocket!!” SpaceX founder Musk posted on X.
The booster starts in the upper right corner. Watch till the end. sound on pic.twitter.com/jS70tHLNcr
, , (@Kimble) 13 October 2024
Liftoff took place at 7:25 a.m. (1225 GMT) in clear weather. While the booster returned to the launchpad, the Starship’s upper stage was scheduled to fall into the Indian Ocean within an hour.
During its last flight in June, SpaceX achieved its first successful splashdown with Starship, a prototype spacecraft that Musk hopes will one day carry humans to Mars.
NASA is also eagerly awaiting a modified version of Starship to act as a lander vehicle for crewed flights to the Moon under the Artemis program later this decade.
SpaceX said its engineers “have spent years preparing and months of testing for the booster catch attempt, with technicians putting thousands of hours into building the infrastructure to maximize our chances of success.”
The teams were monitoring to ensure that “thousands” of criteria were met on both the vehicle and the tower before any attempts to return the Super Heavy booster were made.
Had the conditions not been met, the booster would have been redirected for a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, as in previous tests.
Instead, after being given the green light, the returning booster slowed to supersonic speed and was engulfed by powerful “chopstick arms”.
‘Fail fast, learn fast’
The large mechanical weapons, dubbed “Mechazilla” by Musk, have generated a lot of excitement among space enthusiasts.
Including both stages, Starship stands 397 feet (121 meters) tall – about 90 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty.
Its Super Heavy booster, which is 233 feet long, produces 16.7 million pounds (74.3 meganewtons) of thrust, almost twice as powerful as the Saturn V rocket used during the Apollo missions.
SpaceX’s “fail fast, learn fast” strategy of rapid iterative testing, even as its rockets explode spectacularly, has ultimately accelerated development and contributed to the company’s success.
Founded only in 2002, it quickly overtook the giants of the aerospace industry and is now the world leader in orbital launches, in addition to providing the only US spacecraft currently certified to carry astronauts.
It has also created the world’s largest internet satellite constellation – invaluable in disaster and war zones.
But its founding vision of making humanity a multiplanetary species is increasingly at risk of being tarnished by Musk’s embrace of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his association with right-wing politics.
In recent weeks, the company has openly feuded with the Federal Aviation Administration over launch licensing and alleged violations, with Musk accusing the agency of overreach and calling on its head Michael Whitaker to resign.
“Once Donald Trump becomes president he’s trying to set himself up for minimal regulatory interference with SpaceX,” said Mark Haas, a marketing expert and professor at Arizona State University. “But it’s a calculated gamble if things go the other way.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
