The private US company SpaceX managed to capture the thruster of the largest space rocket ever built, Starship, with its “Mechazilla arms” on the first attempt. A fully reusable spaceship is now close to giving the United States a strategic advantage in the space industry.
At the Boca Chica spaceport in Texas, the massive booster of the first stage of the rocket was recovered by large metal arms while the second stage of the rocket entered orbit on a direct space path towards a splashdown in the Indian Ocean at west of Australia.
The images show the moment in which the booster called “Super Heavy”, after separating from the Starship shuttle at around 74 km altitude, returned to the same area from which it was launched, landing aided by two robotic arms attached to the launch tower.
In the video below you can see how the booster reignites three of its 33 Raptor engines to slow its rapid descent as it targets the launch tower from which it took off. With its engines roaring, the 71-meter-tall booster rested in the arms of the launch tower, locking into place via its four front grille fins that it used to steer through the air.
The new capture-landing method is the latest advance in SpaceX’s development campaign for a fully reusable rocket designed to launch increasingly heavier payloads into orbit and ferry humans to the moon for NASA and eventually reach Mars, the envisioned final destination by the company’s founder, Elon Musk.
Starship, first unveiled by Musk in 2017, has exploded multiple times in various stages of testing in past flights, but successfully completed a full flight in June for the first time. The US Federal Aviation Administration on Saturday approved SpaceX’s launch license for the Starship test, after weeks of tension between the company and its regulator over the pace of launch approvals and fines related to SpaceX’s flagship rocket, the Falcon 9.
Watch Starship’s fifth flight test https://t.co/LVrCnTv797
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 12, 2024
For the founder of Space also the first humanoid robots designed to assist humans in business as well as in household chores.