After 5 years, SpaceX’s rocket landing process has reached new heights, with a recent achievement involving the Super Heavy booster of the Starship rocket.
On October 15th, Elon Musk posted a short video following the successful test flight and recovery of the Starship rocket’s booster just days earlier.
In the video shared by the American billionaire, we see footage of the Starhopper, produced by SpaceX, which conducted a flight in 2019. Next to it is the Super Heavy booster of the Starship rocket.
In its test flight, Starhopper marked the first rocket to use the Raptor engine to take off and land directly on the ground from a height of 150 meters.
Now, five years later, SpaceX’s rocket landing process has been taken to a new level, as the Super Heavy booster is caught in mid-air by a giant robotic arm.
Recently, Elon Musk also explained the idea behind using the tower and robotic arm to recover the booster.
According to Musk, this allows him to remove landing legs from the overall structure. These components were originally intended to help slow down and land the booster and spacecraft, but their weight is significant.
Removing this component improves the payload capacity of the entire system. Additionally, this operation significantly increases the launch cadence, as the robotic arms can immediately lift the rocket onto the launch pad, while the spacecraft is placed on top of the rocket.
According to experts, the technology employed by SpaceX is not just a landing system, but has created a major breakthrough in rocket reusability with almost no margin of error.
The key point is that because the rocket is fixed in mid-air, it can be quickly maintained and reused in a short period of time.
This helps reduce operational costs and speeds up the preparation process between missions. Furthermore, by limiting the need for direct landings on flat surfaces or water, the durability of the components is also better ensured.
After SpaceX successfully retrieved the booster, social media was flooded with short videos and images capturing the impressive moment. Many notable figures, including NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, also took to social media to congratulate Elon Musk on the groundbreaking achievement.
As for Musk himself, he admitted that he had some doubts about the mission’s success, and only predicted that the booster recovery had “a fairly high chance” of succeeding.
The American billionaire also openly shared that many people did not believe in his idea of using a robot arm to catch a 30-story building-like object.
“When I hinted at that idea, people thought I had truly lost my mind,” Musk said in a video posted on social media platform X. “Maybe that’s true. Maybe we would have failed. But in the end, we did it.”
