SpaceX pulls off unprecedented feat, grabs descending rocket with mechanical arms

By R Anil Kumar

Texas, United States, October 15. In one of the most dramatic, high-risk space flights to date, SpaceX launched a gargantuan Super Heavy-Starship rocket on an unpiloted test flight and then used giant “mechazilla” mechanical arms on the pad gantry to pluck the descending first stage out of the sky in an unprecedented feat of engineering.

SpaceX launched its 400-foot-tall (122 meters) Starship vehicle for the fifth time ever today (Oct. 13), sending the giant rocket aloft from its Starbase site in South Texas at 8:25 am. EDT (1225 GMT; 7:25 a.m. local Texas time).

SpaceX catches giant Starship booster with ‘Chopsticks’ on historic Flight 5 rocket launch and landing

The two-stage Super Heavy-Starship, known collectively as the Starship, is the largest, most powerful rocket in the world with twice the liftoff thrust of NASA’s legendary Saturn 5 and nearly twice the power of the agency’s new Space Launch System moon rocket

The Starship upper stage, meanwhile, looped around the planet and re-entered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean as planned, enduring temperatures nearing 3,000 degrees as it descended to a controlled, on-target splashdown.

The spacecraft came through the hellish heat of re-entry in relatively good condition, protected by improved heat-shield tiles and beefed-up steering fins that worked as needed while engulfed in a fireball of atmospheric friction.

But the jaw-dropping first stage capture back at the launch pad, using pincer-like arms more familiarly known as chopsticks, was the clear highlight of the giant rocket’s fifth test flight.

Snagging the descending 23-story-tall Super Heavy booster with the mechazilla arms represented an unprecedented milestone in SpaceX’s drive to develop fully reusable, quickly re-launchable rockets, a technological tour de force unmatched in the history of earlier space programs relying on expendable, throw-away rockets.

“Big step towards making life multiplanetary was made today,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk said on his social media platform X.

The 397-foot-tall rocket blasted off from SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas, flight facility on the Texas Gulf Coast at 8:25 a.m. EDT, putting on a spectacular sunrise show as the booster’s 33 methane-burning Raptor engines ignited with a ground-shaking roar and a torrent of flaming exhaust.

Three minutes and 40 seconds after liftoff, the Super Heavy booster fell away, flipped around and restarted 13 Raptors to reverse course and head back toward the Texas coast as the Starship upper stage continued the climb to space on the power of its six Raptor engines.

The booster’s flight computer was programmed to direct the stage to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico if any problems developed on the rocket or the launch pad capture mechanism.

But no such problems were detected; the flight director sent a required “go” command and the Super Heavy continued toward its launch pad, descending at an angle and then straightening up as it approached the gantry. As it slowly dropped beside the tower, the two mechanical arms smoothly moved in to grab the rocket as its engines shut down.

The remarkable capture, a key element in Musk’s drive to achieve “rapid reusability,” came as the Starship upper stage was still heading to space and splashdown in the Indian Ocean, simulating a touchdown on shore or, eventually, on the moon or Mars.

During the rocket’s fourth test flight in June, the extreme temperatures caused significant damage to the Starship’s protective tiles and steering fins. Multiple upgrades and improvements were put in place for Sunday’s, October 13, flight to eliminate or minimize any such re-entry damage.

As the Starship re-entered the atmosphere, cameras on the rocket showed the reddish glow of heat building up on the belly of the spacecraft, intensifying as the descent continued. Engulfed in a fireball, the ship’s fins stayed intact and the vehicle came through peak heating in good condition.

Moments later, the cameras captured an on-target splashdown followed by what appeared to be an explosion. Given the rocket is not intended to land in water, whatever happened after splashdown was incidental to what can only be called a successful test flight.

The two-stage Super Heavy-Starship, known collectively as the Starship, is the largest, most powerful rocket in the world with twice the liftoff thrust of NASA’s legendary Saturn 5 and nearly twice the power of the agency’s new Space Launch System moon rocket.

The 30-foot-wide Super Heavy first stage, loaded with 6.8 million pounds of liquid oxygen and methane propellants, stands 230 feet tall and is powered by 33 SpaceX-designed Raptor engines generating up to 16 million pounds of thrust. The Starship upper stage measures 160 feet long and carries 2.6 million pounds of propellant to power another six Raptors.

Both stages are designed to be fully reusable, with the Super Heavy flying itself back to its launch pad while the Starship travels to and from Earth orbit, the moon, or, eventually, Mars. The Starship is designed to touch down vertically on its own rocket power at landing sites on Earth and beyond.

But the primary goal of Sunday’s October 13, flight was to demonstrate the ability to capture returning Super Heavy boosters on the launch pad where they can be quickly refurbished, refuelled and relaunched.

SpaceX perfected first-stage landings with its workhorse Falcon 9 rockets, successfully recovering 352 such boosters to date with powered touchdowns on landing pads or off-shore droneships.

The smaller Falcon 9 first stages land on their own, deploying four landing legs a few seconds before touchdown.

Snatching the 230-foot-tall Super Heavy out of the sky with mechanical arms as the rocket descends and hovers right beside its launch gantry seemed an outlandish idea when it was first proposed during the booster’s initial development.

But SpaceX engineers “spent years preparing and months testing for the booster catch attempt, with technicians pouring tens of thousands of hours into building the infrastructure to maximize our chances for success,” the company said on its website.

“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,” the company continued.

SpaceX is 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 program.

To get a Starship lander to the moon, SpaceX must first get it into low-Earth orbit, then launch multiple Super Heavy-Starship “tankers” to refuel the moon-bound Starship for the trip to lunar orbit.

The astronauts will launch atop NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and fly to the moon aboard a Lockheed Martin-built Orion capsule. The crew will transfer to the waiting Starship for the descent to the lunar surface. NASA hopes to send the first woman and the next man to the moon in the 2027-28 timeframe, after an unpiloted Starship moon landing.

Rapid reusability is a key element of the program given the number of Super Heavy-Starships that will be required for a single moon landing. While Sunday’s October 13, test flight appeared to go smoothly, multiple flights will be needed to perfect the system and demonstrate the reliability required to carry astronauts.

How long that might take is an open question.

Over the past few weeks, Musk has launched a social media broadside against the Federal Aviation Administration, complaining that the agency’s bureaucracy takes too long to review and approve launch licenses and is, in effect, stifling innovation and slowing the development of the new rocket system.

The FAA did not grant a license to launch Sunday’s October 13, test flight until the day before. But this time around, the license covered multiple test flights using roughly the same flight plan.

The mission aimed to break new ground for Starship, and for spaceflight in general: SpaceX planned to return Starship’s huge first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, directly to its launch mount, catching it with the “chopstick” arms of the launch tower in a bold and unprecedented manoeuvre.

And that’s exactly what happened. About seven minutes after liftoff, SpaceX’s Super Heavy executed what appeared to be a bull’s-eye landing, hovering near the Mechazilla launch tower as the tower captured it with its metal arms.

“This is a day for the engineering history books,” Kate Tice, SpaceX manager of Quality Systems Engineering, said during live commentary as SpaceX employees screamed and cheered at the company’s Hawthorne, California headquarters behind her. “This is absolutely insane! On the first-ever attempt, we have successfully caught the Super Heavy booster back at the launch tower.”

The booster catch was not the only goal for Flight 5. SpaceX also aimed to send Starship’s 165-foot-tall (50 m) upper stage — known as Starship, or simply Ship — to space and bring it back to Earth with a splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

That occurred about 65 minutes after liftoff, with the Ship firing three of its six engines to hover over the ocean before tipping over and exploding.

“That was amazing,” Tice said. “We were not intending to recover any of Starship, so that was the best ending that we could have hoped for.”

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, agreed.

“Big step towards making life multiplanetary was made today,” Elon Musk wrote on X (formerly Twitter), after the landing.

SpaceX is developing Starship to help humanity settle on the moon and Mars, among other exploration feats. The vehicle is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable (as evidenced by the Super Heavy launch-mount landing plan, which will slash the time needed between flights). This characteristic, combined with Starship’s unprecedented power, could revolutionize spaceflight, according to the company and Musk.

NASA is a believer in the vehicle, selecting it to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis program of moon exploration. If all goes to plan, Starship will land NASA astronauts on Earth’s nearest neighbour for the first time on the Artemis 3 mission, which is targeted to launch in September 2026.

SpaceX aims to get Starship up and running in time to meet such deadlines via its usual development strategy — tweaking the vehicle and testing those tweaks on test flights, then repeating the process. Indeed, the Flight 5 Starship featured some significant modifications compared to its predecessors.

“One of the key upgrades on Starship ahead of flight was a complete rework of its heat shield, with SpaceX technicians spending more than 12,000 hours replacing the entire thermal protection system with newer-generation tiles, a backup ablative layer and additional protections between the flap structures,” SpaceX wrote in a Flight 5 mission description.

Starship’s previous four test flights occurred in April and November of 2023 and March and June of this year.

The rocket has performed better on each successive flight. The debut mission lasted just four minutes, for example; SpaceX ordered a detonation high in the Texas sky after Starship’s two stages failed to separate. But Flight 4, which launched on June 6, was a complete success; Ship reached orbital velocity, and both it and Super Heavy survived their return to Earth, landing in their designated splashdown zones. And Starship took another leap today.

If it were up to SpaceX, Flight 5 likely would’ve been in the books two months ago; the company said that Starship was ready to go from a technical standpoint in early August.

Launches require approval from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), however, and the agency needed more time before greenlighting this one. Indeed, last month, the FAA said that it didn’t expect approval for Flight 5 to come before late November.

The FAA explained its reasoning in an emailed statement to Space.com on Sept. 11.

“SpaceX’s current license authorizing the Starship Flight 4 launch also allows for multiple flights of the same vehicle configuration and mission profile. SpaceX chose to modify both for its proposed Starship Flight 5 launch, which triggered a more in-depth review,” agency officials wrote.

“In addition, SpaceX submitted new information in mid-August detailing how the environmental impact of Flight 5 will cover a larger area than previously reviewed,” they added. “This requires the FAA to consult with other agencies.”

SpaceX was not happy with the news. On Sept. 10, the company published a blog post titled “Starships Are Meant to Fly,” which claimed that the FAA had previously given SpaceX a mid-September estimate for Flight 5’s approval. The document also expressed frustration with the FAA’s pace and process and with launch-industry regulations in general.

The Flight 5 “delay was not based on a new safety concern, but instead driven by superfluous environmental analysis,” SpaceX wrote in the post.

“We find ourselves delayed for unreasonable and exasperating reasons,” the company added. “Unfortunately, we continue to be stuck in a reality where it takes longer to do the government paperwork to license a rocket launch than it does to design and build the actual hardware,” the company added. “This should never happen and directly threatens America’s position as the leader in space.”

In the end, the late-November estimate for Flight 5 proved pessimistic.

And it’s safe to assume that SpaceX wants to launch another Starship mission relatively soon. Last month, SpaceX conducted a static fire — a common prelaunch test in which a rocket’s engines are fired while it remains anchored to the ground — with the Flight 6 Ship vehicle.

And there will be more test missions coming after that; SpaceX always has a few Starships in the queue, and it’s always itching to fly.

(This Article Generated from SpaceX Website and the Company’s Release)