SpaceX launched its enormous Starship rocket on Sunday on its boldest test flight yet—and caught the returning booster back at the pad with mechanical arms, per the AP. Towering almost 400 feet, the empty Starship blasted off at sunrise from the southern tip of Texas near the Mexican border. It arced over the Gulf of Mexico like the four Starships before it that ended up being destroyed, either soon after liftoff or while ditching into the sea. This time, however, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk upped the challenge and risk.
The company brought the first-stage booster back to land at the pad from which it had soared seven minutes earlier. The launch tower sported monstrous metal arms, dubbed chopsticks, that caught the descending 232-foot booster. "Are you kidding me?" SpaceX's Dan Huot said from near the launch site. "I am shaking right now." From SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, SpaceX's Kate Tice added, "This is a day for the engineering history books."
Once free of the booster, the retro-looking stainless steel spacecraft on top continued around the world, with a splashdown expected in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX has been recovering the first-stage boosters of its smaller Falcon 9 rockets for nine years, after delivering satellites and crews to orbit from Florida or California. But they land on floating ocean platforms or on concrete slabs several miles from their launch pads—not on them.
story continues below
Recycling Falcon boosters has sped up the launch rate and saved SpaceX millions. Musk intends to do the same for Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built with 33 methane-fuel engines on the booster alone. NASA has ordered two Starships to land astronauts on the moon later this decade. SpaceX intends to use Starship to send people and supplies to the moon and, eventually Mars.
(More
SpaceX stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
