In a historic test conducted on Sunday, SpaceX achieved a major milestone for its Starship program by successfully launching and catching the Super Heavy booster with its giant “chopstick” arms. This test, conducted at the company’s Starbase in Texas, marked the fifth flight of the development program, demonstrating SpaceX’s progress toward making space travel more reusable. The Starship, a nearly 400-foot rocket, is central to SpaceX’s goal of enabling interplanetary travel and will also play a key role in NASA’s Artemis mission to the moon.
The main highlight of this test was the unprecedented “catch” of the Super Heavy booster after its separation from the Starship. Using two chopstick-like arms attached to the launch tower, the booster hovered and then positioned itself for a soft landing within the arms. This maneuver is designed to allow SpaceX to recover and reuse the entire rocket system in future flights. While the booster was recovered, the Starship upper stage continued its mission, eventually splashing down in the Indian Ocean as planned, though it was not intended to be retrieved.
SpaceX had to meet thousands of performance criteria for this catch to work, and despite some regulatory delays, the FAA approved the launch just in time. The company had previously expressed frustration with the FAA’s pace but ultimately received approval for this test and the next one in the series. As engineers continue to refine Starship, this flight brings SpaceX closer to its ambitious goal of rapid reusability in space travel.
While SpaceX plans to bring back the Starship upper stage in future flights, the successful booster catch is a crucial step in developing a fully reusable rocket system. By building on lessons from each test, SpaceX aims to lower the cost of space access and potentially open the door to deep space missions, including to Mars.
In its update, SpaceX noted that with each flight, it is pushing its hardware further and learning new techniques to perfect the Starship design. As SpaceX fine-tunes its processes, it envisions revolutionizing humanity’s access to space, making missions more frequent, cost-effective, and ambitious.
