Yesterday was a good day for SpaceX and Elon Musk, and a banner day in the history of man’s quest for the stars.
Not only did the launch of Starship, the largest interplantery rocket in the SpaceX fleet, standing over 400 feet tall and weighing over 5,000 tons, go off without a hitch from the Starbase launchpad in Boca Chica, Texas, but the vessel successfully delivered its payload of 26 Starlink V3 satellites over the course of its 22.5-hour mission, according to reporting from CNN, while orbiting the Earth 14 times.
But the real sticking point was always going to be the landing, where the SpaceX team attempted to prove their “reusable” rocket theory by successfully catching the falling Starship with some well-timed rocket boosters and incredible feats of engineering. The catch has been attempted a few times before on prior missions, successfully for the Super Heavy Booster on three occasions, but yesterday marked the first time the actual Starship was caught by the company’s giant mechanical arms.
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Understandably elated, Musk took to X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, to share his incredible POV from atop the tower, shortly after the Starship catch:
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Because journalists and bystanders were relegated to a safe watch site far away from the Starship catch site, most of the photos and footage of the catch struggles to convey the sheer size of the spaceship, but Musk’s perspective gives a better sense of the scale of the ship and, therefore, the incredible challenge of executing a soft landing.
And for a better sense of how incredible the maneuver itself was, check out this time-lapse shot also shared by Musk:
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If you missed the high drama of this most recent launch and landing, no worries: the next SpaceX mission, USSF-317, is around the corner.