SpaceX Has Achieved What Seemed Impossible: Catching the Starship’s Booster on Its First Attempt

SpaceX recently turned science fiction into reality and broadcast it online. On Sunday, the company successfully attempted to catch Starship’s Super Heavy booster, the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built, in flight. This was only the second time in history that an orbital rocket had landed, with the first being SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

Launch and separation. On Sunday, at 7:25 a.m. local time at SpaceX’s Starbase in Southeast Texas, Starship lifted off for the fifth time, igniting its 33 Raptor engines perfectly. The 398-foot-tall rocket soared for two and a half minutes to a horizontal position at an altitude of about 43 miles. It then shut down all but three of its engines for stage separation.

After separation, Starship ignited its engines to move away from the Super Heavy booster. Super Heavy then reignited its engines and successfully performed a spin maneuver to glide back to the launch pad. The booster jettisoned the hot separation ring earlier to reduce its weight. This won’t be necessary in the future because SpaceX plans to redesign the interstage.

Catching Super Heavy. The Super Heavy booster used its hot gas thrusters, also known as the reaction control system, and grid fins to glide back toward the launch pad. Five minutes after liftoff, with the tower and rocket in good shape, the flight director gave the go-ahead for the capture attempt.

Six and a half minutes after liftoff, the Super Heavy booster reignited 13 of its engines for braking. As it approached the launch tower, it maneuvered with three engines. The booster was positioned at the precise height to be embraced by the 469-foot tower as the tower arms closed.

Why? SpaceX designed the Starship probe to be rapidly reusable. While the spacecraft can land on its own, the company’s plan for the 233-foot-tall Super Heavy booster is to return it to the launch pad directly on the arms of the Mechazilla tower, which SpaceX already used to stack the two stages of the huge rocket.

In the future, the company plans to use the tower to catch the Super Heavy booster and then place it on the launch pad to fly again. The same arms will put another Starship on top of it, and engineers will fill both stages with methane and liquid oxygen for a new liftoff in a matter of hours.

Why this matters. Future versions of Starship will be able to launch more than 100 tons of cargo into low-Earth orbit. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is aiming for more than 200 tons for the Starship 3 version. With the ability to quickly reuse the rocket’s two stages, launch costs will drop to previously unthinkable levels, allowing satellite constellations like Starlink to scale at higher speeds.

However, SpaceX has even more ambitious plans for Starship beyond Earth orbit. The spacecraft is expected to carry the first woman to the surface of the Moon if NASA’s Artemis III mission doesn’t face further delays. It’s also the spacecraft Musk wants to use to colonize Mars. The tech mogul is aiming for 2026, the year of the next alignment between Earth and the Red Planet, to launch five unmanned Starships to Mars and attempt to land them.

Image | SpaceX

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