It’s a day for the history books at Elon Musk’s SpaceX. On Sunday, the company’s Starship spacecraft successfully completed its planned flight, before its Super Heavy rocket was remarkably caught by mechanical arms known as Mechazilla.
Things went well from the start, with Starship successfully executing a hot-stage separation, igniting its six Raptor engines, and arriving into outer space.
The space craft followed its planned trajectory in space, before reentering Earth’s atmosphere, executing a flip, and a landing burn. It then splashed into the target area in the Indian Ocean, thus concluding the flight test just over one hour after it began.
While Sunday’s events marked Starships fifth test flight, it was the first time SpaceX attempted to execute the catch of the Super Heavy rocket booster. It turns out SpaceX didn’t need more than one chance to successfully do just that. The so-called “chopstick arms” of the launch and catch tower perfectly caught the booster.
Musk reacted to the epic feat on X.
“The tower has caught the rocket!!” he wrote in one tweet, before adding in a second, “[A] big step towards making life multiplanetary was made today.”
SpaceX engineer Dan Huot also celebrated the accomplishment.
“Even in this day and age, what we just saw is magic. I am shaking right now,” he said during the broadcast. Later, he tweeted, “I’m crying right now.”
Kate Tice, another SpaceX engineer, took to X to mark the moment.
“I couldn’t say this on air but HOLY SHIT,” she marveled, adding that she and her co-workers are “not okay.”
“Still in awe,” she added in a follow up tweet. “On the first try. Are you kidding me??”
The post SpaceX’s ‘Mechazilla Arms’ Make History as They Catch Super Heavy Rocket Booster appeared first on VICE.
The post SpaceX’s ‘Mechazilla Arms’ Make History as They Catch Super Heavy Rocket Booster appeared first on VICE.
