SpaceX catches Starship with robotic arms after orbital flight

Tower catch at Starbase

Elon Musk's SpaceX on Saturday carried out the first-ever recovery of a spaceship, as its Starship vessel returned safely to the launch pad at Starbase, Texas, where giant robotic arms caught it after a mission lasting more than 22 hours. The maneuver marked the first time an upper-stage rocket returning from orbit was caught and brought to a safe, upright position by its launch tower.

The tower, nicknamed Mechazilla, uses two enormous mechanical arms built to catch returning rockets rather than letting them land on the ground. The system is part of SpaceX's effort to develop fully reusable rockets, a goal that can drastically reduce mission costs and make more frequent launches possible.

“Mechazilla catches Starship!” the company said in a statement, congratulating its team on an “incredible achievement.” SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot described the moment in broader terms. “That was the Holy Grail of space flight, plummeting through fire to be snatched out of the air by steel. We caught a Starship and now everything changes,” Huot said.

Orbit and descent

The 171-foot-tall (52-meter) spacecraft, flying on the 15th test flight of the world's biggest and most powerful rocket system, orbited Earth 14 times and deployed 26 satellites for Musk's Starlink satellite internet constellation. It then began its return journey, completed its descent and approached the tower above Launch Pad 2, where the arms caught it.

Engineers mapped the vessel's path home with care, according to senior SpaceX engineer Lars Blackmore. “If you want to get back to the east coast of Texas, you have to fly over the entire continent to get back there. So inevitably, you're flying over land and we spend a lot of time figuring out the safest way to do that,” Blackmore said. Starship flew over sparsely inhabited desert areas and wove over towns before carrying out a “giant swoosh maneuver” in its final approach, looping around the cities of Texas' Rio Grande Valley and coming in to its landing site from the east.

Booster setback

SpaceX had captured returning booster rockets three times before, but catching Starship was extraordinarily complex because the spaceship fell much faster and from a much higher altitude than boosters do. The attempt to catch the Super Heavy booster, the rocket's first-stage component, was unsuccessful this time.

The booster ran into a technical issue on Friday during its descent and was redirected to the Gulf of Mexico just off the launch site. It automatically self-destructed, with a fireball erupting from the booster, before hitting the water. US space agency NASA administrator Jared Isaacman congratulated SpaceX on Friday for “another spectacular launch” without mentioning the booster disappointment.

Road ahead for Starship

Some versions of Starship are designed to launch internet satellites and data centers into orbit, while other iterations will ferry people to the Moon and Mars. NASA is expecting Starship to serve as a lunar lander on its Artemis mission.

The project has been plagued by delays as SpaceX grapples with novel engineering challenges, including the unsolved problem of transferring fuel to the spaceship while in orbit — a requirement for any journey to the Moon or Mars. The company, which already operates the partially reusable Falcon rockets that regularly launch satellites and carry astronauts to the International Space Station, also needs to fine-tune the Super Heavy further.

SpaceX made its stock market debut in June, raising about $85.7 billion, and is now investing heavily in production and launch capabilities. During a tour of its million-square-foot (93,000-square-meter) factory at Starbase on Friday, company officials told journalists it can now produce a spaceship every two weeks and a booster every four weeks.