Musk grabs the booster
October 14, 2024
History was made the moment the SpaceX ‘mechazilla’ mechanical arms grabbed the returning Super Heavy Starship booster. Even Elon Musk hadn’t wholly expected this level of success for his rocket programme. The Starship’s upper stage continued on its orbital flight to a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean and sufficiently on target for the landing to be captured by cameras on a waiting vessel.
The unprecedented engineering images of the grab went around the world on October 13th. But perhaps even more amazing was the fact that within a few hours the rocket booster had been removed and placed onto its launch platform. This is the eventual aim: While this booster will be closely examined by SpaceX’s engineers and technicians, the overall mission is to be able to reuse a booster within a matter of hours and not days.
Indeed, SpaceX confirmed that their new 1 million square feet fabrication and assembly factory is designed to be able to produce “1,000 Starships per year”.
By any measure this was a 100 per cent successful test flight. There is now speculation – as yet unconfirmed – that the next flight (#6) could carry a cargo of Starlink broadband satellites. Such a mission would enable both elements of the rocket, the booster and the Starship itself, could return to their launch site. SpaceX has already carried out similar missions with its smaller Falcon 9 rockets.
“With each flight building on the learnings from the last, testing improvements in hardware and operations across every facet of Starship, we’re on the verge of demonstrating techniques fundamental to Starship’s fully and rapidly reusable design,” SpaceX stated.
Of course, Musk’s plans call for flights to the Moon (2027-2028 timeframe) and then Mars. SpaceX is already under contract with NASA to supply a modified Starship to carry astronauts to landings near the moon’s south pole in the agency’s Artemis programme.
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