SpaceX keeps taking humanity to places it hasn’t gone before.
SpaceX has successfully caught its Super Heavy booster rocket using a pair of mechanized arms near the launch area. After pushing the rocket off into space, the Super Heavy booster gently glided back to base, and was caught by the pair of arms that SpaceX affectionately calls ‘chopsticks’. This is the first time that a booster rocket has been caught by a pair of mechanized arms for reuse.
Starship’s Flight 5 launch had taken place from Boco Chica near the Mexican border. The rocket took off in the early morning, and within a span of 3 minutes, reached a speed of 5,200 kmph. At this point, the booster separated from the Starship, and its thrusters were turned off. Slowly, the booster’s speed decreased, and after reaching a maximum altitude of 94 km, it began heading back to earth.
It took around a minute for the booster to get close to the base, during which it decreased its speed and aligned itself vertically in order to be caught by the mechanized arms. After a few heart-stopping moments in which it appeared that the booster was losing control and would smash against the arms, it managed to regain control, and managed to align itself alongside the arm. As its speed decreased to 0 while it was hanging mid-air, the mechanized arms closed around it, and securely held on to it. The thrusters were turned off, and the booster remained suspended safely in the mechanized arms. The Super Heavy booster rocket can now be reused for future launches, which can decrease the costs associated with launching large spaceships like Starship.
It was quite a spectacle, and reminiscent of the time SpaceX had landed two rockets back to earth, similarly to be reused for future missions. This catch was even more striking because of how exact the maneuvering had to be to align the rocket exactly with the arms, and the thrust required to bring its speed down to 0 at the exact right moment. Nonetheless, SpaceX pulled off the feat in its first ever attempt at such a catch, and created history.
Incredibly, this catch has come days after Elon Musk’s other company, Tesla, had demonstrated self-driving cars and dancing robots that spoke with people and mixed drinks. It would be hard to run a single company that pulls of such historic feats, but Musk is not only running around five category-defining companies that are pushing the boundaries of what humanity is capable of, but is managing to show mind-bending results twice in the same week. Musk is still only 53 years old, but it’s clear he has already has cemented his place in the history books for centuries to come.