The footage is absolutely insane.
First Catch
Elon Musk’s space venture SpaceX has just pulled off the seemingly impossible.
During the company’s fifth Starship test flight, SpaceX successfully caught the spacecraft’s Super Heavy booster using its “Mechazilla” tower, an unbelievable feat of engineering that required an immense amount of precision and experience.
It’s the first time the company even attempted the maneuver, highlighting just how much progress the company has made since the first orbital test flight in April 2023.
And it was a picture-perfect landing, with the massive booster slowly adjusting its descent using its thrusters to gently be caught by the tower’s “chopsticks” arms.
“Good, our first catch of the day!” a SpaceX staffer said during the company’s livestream.
Witness Me
It’s a tremendous result, and not everybody thought it was possible.
“I admit I did not expect this to work,” Harvard astronomer and space tracker Jonathan McDowell tweeted.
The booster measures a whopping 233 feet in height and weighs over 600,000 pounds without any propellant loaded.
The test marks a major step forward in the company’s efforts to develop a fully reusable heavy-lift launch platform that could one day take astronauts to the Moon and, perhaps one day, to Mars.
More on Starship: NASA Is Mega Hyped About SpaceX’s Imminent Starship Test Flight
