SpaceX catches the Starship to end Flight 15

Starship is, essentially, Space Shuttle done right: fully reusable booster without solid boosters (avoids Challenger disaster) and orbiter stacked on top instead of on the side (avoid Columbia disaster).

The original designs for the Space Shuttle had the booster (with wings!) return to the launch site, but the cost for two new crewed vehicles was too large, so they scaled it back to the compromised version.

Even more revolutionary, compared to Shuttle, Starship is built on an assembly line. They can build a booster ever 4 weeks and a ship every 2 weeks.

The future we were promised in the 1970s is about to become real.

If the heat shield holds up then this changes everything. Next step is double catch and re-flying the same ships and catching again, then payloads to orbit become significantly cheaper opening a new era in space flight.

Huge congratulations to the engineering team on this one! It's been quite interesting to watch the evolution of Starship. Had they put another couple of tonnes of propellant and oxidizer on the Booster they might have caught both of them. It is still unclear to me what the final mass fraction to orbit will work out to be, but something that is 100% re-usable is better than something 60% reusable[1].

[1] Estimate of Falcon 9's booster + fairings being 60% (by cost, not by mass) of the launch package.

Insane achievement! It is the dawn of a new era! One that has been 10+ years in the making.

To everyone who works at SpaceX and read this. You are all amazing.

I hope other great minds at SpaceX are well remembered into the far future.

I like that they wrote "dont panic" on the fuselage above the s42 badge

If this makes even me want to go study engineering I know it will inspire millions of youngsters into making the future we all want. Bravo!

The engineering of this is just mind boggling awesome. The culmination of so many fields, so many factors, to this. Congrats!!!

Watched it with my 5 year old daughter (3 year old son was sadly uninterested), and we were both cheering and high fiving. Very exciting.

So precise it was almost boring - incredible work. Kudos.

I know engineering is about expediency, and price, but I’m still bummed that we aren’t getting ships with landing gear in this or likely the next generation of rockets either.

Seems that the heavier the rocket the more ground clearance to need to self-land, and so you can’t scale up the dragon’s landing system. I don’t think there’s anywhere near enough weight to shave off of the next rocket or enough specific impulse to add to bring the size back down.

Congratulations to the steely eyed missile men and women of SpaceX.

The "Baby Come Back" soundtrack really brought this home for me. What an incredible achievement. Very moving.

I imagine this is what it was like to witness Apollo 11 55 years ago.

Do we know why they didn't try to catch the booster?

Holy ship, it was picture perfect capture!

This is absolutely incredible!! I can’t wrap my head around this.

will scaling the size of the rocket continue to be the way to go? will doing a three stage setup make sense?

That was incredible to watch!

Huge congratulations to the team.

Honestly if this thread had the actual number of points it deserved based on the kind of milestone this represents for humanity's future and access to space, it would be in the millions.

If you don't follow rocketry you can't possibly understand what this means.

This was the Trinity test.

And even if you hate Elon and all his businesses, this knowledge will proliferate. Either by talent movement / osmosis, by espionage or just being inspired ("if they can do it, maybe we have a chance as well").

Within a decade the average cost to LEO will drop 20x-50x and if you're not recovering both of your stages, you don't exist.

We witnessed history today

If you ignore the scale it doesn’t seem all the impressive. But the scale is bonkers.

Ah man I just missed it. The live feed is just stock footage. Any links to the catch?

Can anyone explain this to an idiot like to me? I follow information tech, but am pretty ignorant on engineering/space.

I recall the SpaceX chopsticks catch from about a year ago, which looked great.

This looks similar (heavy thing lands smoothly on a platform) but I gather it's very different from the comments?

Damned impressive.

That was incredible impressive, what a feat of engineering!

The heat shield looks very good. Excited to see how much work it will take to fly this again. I'm in awe. I like the future sometimes.

Best thing ever built and it works!!!

The most amazing thing i've seen in a while.

You can see a plane passing underneath it at video timestamp 22:44:43!

Congrats to SpaceX engineers! But for those who are not fans of the guy at the top here's a video of Blue Origin landing their rocket. Competition is good! https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XjSmNf3y37U

This is incredible. Huge respect for the engineering team. What a time to be alive.

As an aside, it’s been fun watching the number of UFO posts on Reddit while Starship orbited Earth. They all refused to believe it was SpaceX.

It's crazy how far you have to scroll to even see this on the front page of NYT.

i wonder how much fuel was left over after landing? What is their safety margin in seconds of burn remaining?

How many years until the next milestones?

- in orbit refueling

- moon landing

- Mars rendez-vous

- Mars landing

- humans on Mars

Nah, the game is to put data centers in space. Plus the Space Force dreams.

It's very impressive

Holy cow.

Magical era. What a feat!

Congrats to the engineers.

(But lose the bastard at the top, OK?)

It's difficult to underline how huge this is. This marks the first time in the history of rocketry that the upper stage of a rocket has returned home from orbit to a safe, upright landing.

(And to preempt the obvious objection: yes, maybe you can call the Space Shuttle an "upper stage of a rocket" if you squint hard enough, but it didn't do upright landings, its external tank was not reusable and even the Shuttle itself was effectively rebuilt from scratch at exorbitant cost each time.)

It's sad to see a lot of media missing the point, eg as I type this BBC is reporting this as "SpaceX successfully catches part of Starship rocket on its return to Earth".

Edit: corrected to note that the SRBs were reusable, but the ET was not.

Feels good.

Legendary ♥

New tech tree unlocked for humanity.

This achievement likely changes the course of life in this solar system.

Impressive how reliable they've made those engines!

Kind of crazy to reduce the hardware on ship so much and move so much complexity to the ground. This can really only happen in a situation where anybody can throw out any dumb idea, because if you suggested this 20 years ago people would think you are an idiot.

From Wernher von Braun to Elon Musk... It seems we're living in a Mel Brooks movie (with the funny parts removed).

perfect. hyperbole failure moment

SpaceX made me watch engineering feats live on stream. I love it!

This is exactly the most impressive feat of engineering I have ever seen.

Only catching both the booster and the rocket would top this one. But the rocket only being caught is still impressive regardless.

SpaceX below $1T is criminally undervalued.

Damn, that looked smooth and glorious. This is how I'd like the future to be.

It's just mostly newtonian physics ... nice job but not that impressive. With the right investments we could have done this decades ago.

Nice! I wonder how the engineering involved here compares to the engineering behind manufacturing TSMC chips (including ASML machines, Zeiss optics etc.). Which is harder?

As it seems building rockets has historically been a capital intensive business with low profits and limited demand, so there just wasn't much competition in the space industry.

Reusable stages is very neat, but seems a little crazy to pay the tyranny of the rocket equation twice. I heard one person say that carrying fuel to land over the whole flight means it takes 23x more launches to get an equivalent payload to orbit.

Using modern technology, couldn't disposable first stages be produced much more cheaply than during the space race?

How much of modern manufacturing disposable booster's cost would be fuel vs metal?

Do we just look past the failed primary booster objective? (I didn't write the brief)

Edit: Yes, ignore that bit.

bet they used lidar

(let's see who gets the joke)

seriously though, do we know the names of the engineers who made this possible or is it a secret?

I hope they can make significant progress before the socialists take over. They were practically begging for launch permits under Biden.

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