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Watched several times, amazing stuff. Had flashbacks to playing Jupiter Landing on the C64! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Lander Edit: SpaceX should create a simple 'catch' the rocket game. Play in browser style. Just for kicks and marketing.
Shameless plug for my own project with a similar bent - write your own lunar lander autopilot in browser lunar.unnecessarymodification.com
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Closeup of chopsticks as they were catching the booster, best clip from Everyday Astronaut's livestream: https://x.com/kagurazakimoto/status/1845447451592765820
The SpaceX clip is better https://x.com/spacex/status/1845442658397049011?s=46
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It is a rocket. The biggest difference with the Falcon 9 first stage is that this one is about 6 times as big (diameter of 9m vs 3.7m), and that catching it with the tower requires a much higher precision in landing location. The drone ships that Falcon 9 lands on are about 90 x 50 meter. To catch it with the tower, they need to be accurate to within a few meters. The big advantage of catching it with the tower is th…
The critical differences between Falcon 9 first stage and the Starship booster is that Starship booster lands using 3 engines rather than 1, and can throttle them down much further. 3 vs 1 gives Starship more directional control for precise landing (critical for this "catch" maneuver), and throttling allows it to hover, as it does right before the "catch".
Nothing could have prepared me for how that catch looked. I was sure the rocket was careening into the tower at the last second before it straightened out. The control algorithms must be incredible for the landing system to work within those small tolerances.
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They can probably go fishing, but anything that sunk is gonna stay sunk. That ocean is not shallow, and deep submarine operations are expensive …
Do they worry about any issues of the debris winding up in the hands of China or Russia? I would imagine the raptor engines are mostly intact.
It's difficult to overstate how important the milestone of catching the booster is. Now we have a reusable rocket an order of magnitude larger than anything we've had before, and the cost of kg to orbit just nosedived.
I'm not sure how critical "catching" the booster is to reusability, but it does save weight by not needing legs for landing, and perhaps the booster suffers less stress this way? Note that the booster is not really being "caught" although this is the word it seems we're stuck with. It's really more like landing on the arms, since it throttles to a hover at that point.
Magnificent, it's hard to image what we'll be able to do once these do roundtrips daily. For those are not aware, that booster is 71 m (233 ft) tall!
Improvements that make space flight more sustainable are welcome ... unless that means an order of magnitude more pollution in a less controllable form, like emissions. [Due to more frequent flights] Daily trips to space likely also mean more debris in space and falling to earth. I hope there is a balance that includes the lives of people near these sites and all of us sharing the same atmosphere.
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This is a nonsense conspiracy theory. It popped up based mostly off conserving a single man’s connection to 2001 SpaceX. Does Starship enable brilliant pebbles? Sure. But that’s because it provides easy access to space. Starlink could be described as a network of communication ‘pebbles’, as could Starshield, SpaceX’s actual military contract [1]. (Starship provides a technology platform for rapid launch. That’s more…
v0.9: 227 kg (500 lb)
v1: 260 kg (570 lb)
v1.5: ~306 kg (675 lb)
v2 mini: ~740 kg (1,630 lb)
v2: ~1,250 kg (2,760 lb)