SpaceX achieved a historic feat in engineering and space travel on Sunday when its mechanical arms caught its nearly 400-foot Starship booster returning to the launchpad after a successful uncrewed test flight.
The rocket, which is taller than the Statue of Liberty, carries the Starship spacecraft on top of the Super Heavy Booster. It lifted off from southern Texas, after which the capsule detached and made a controlled landing in the Indian Ocean. It was the company’s fifth test flight.
Unlike previous attempts, which ended in explosions or ditching into the sea, this mission saw the first-stage booster return safely to the launch pad, caught upright by the tower’s massive “chopstick” arms.
“Science fiction without the fiction part” is how SpaceX CEO Elon Musk described the aerospace engineering milestone.
Catching the booster is a big step toward SpaceX’s goal of making rockets fully reusable, enabling faster and more frequent space missions.
NASA, which has invested $4 billion in the Starship program, intends to use it for the Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since the 1970s. Starship is also central to Elon Musk’s Mars colonization plans.