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SpaceX captured the upper stage of its Starship megarocket for the first time today (November 14), a historic achievement that could unlock the giant vehicle’s immense potential.
Spacecraft launched on his 15th test flight Friday evening (November 13), rising into the sky from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas. The mission plan called for bringing both stages of the vehicle back to Starbase and catching them with the launch tower’s “wand” arms – an unprecedented total recovery of an orbital craft. rocket.
This did not happen; Starship’s Super Heavy booster diverted to a water landing in the Gulf of Mexico Friday after receiving a low fuel alarm. But Ship succeeded in its attempt, achieving an important milestone for SpaceX and its dream of complete rocket reuse.
“It was the missing link,” SpaceX’s Dan Huot said today during the company’s webcast of the landing, his voice thick with emotion. “It was the holy grail of space flight, diving through fire only to be ripped out of the air by steel. We caught a spaceship, and now everything changes.”
The vessel’s capture occurred today at 4:20 p.m. EST (9:20 p.m. GMT; 3:20 p.m. Texas local time), approximately 22.5 hours after Flight 15 took off.
Many SpaceX employees came out to watch the vehicle, known as Ship 42, descend through the clouds toward its Starbase launch tower, which the company calls “Mechazilla.”
And they had quite a spectacle: Ship 42 gently nestled in Mechazilla’s waiting arms, while “Baby Come Back” played on SpaceX’s webcast of the landing.
“It’s so amazing to see,” SpaceX’s Jessie Anderson said during the livestream. “One of the most incredible and historic engineering feats of all time just happened before our eyes.”
Why was this so important? SpaceX already had caught Super Heavy – on three previous Starship test flights, in fact. But he had never tried it before with Ship. The upper stage is a more difficult target, because it flies higher, further and faster than the booster. Indeed, during flight 15, ship 42 came down from its orbit.
While the double capture attempt and the wands’ success with Ship were the main headlines of Flight 15, the mission had other objectives as well. One was to put the ship into orbit, which had happened on only one previous launch of the ship – Flight 14which took off on September 28.
The ship deployed 26 of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink V3 broadband satellites in low earth orbit (LEO) on Flight 14, and again on Flight 15. These 52 spacecraft are the first members of a constellation that will eventually be composed of 100,000 satellitesif everything goes according to SpaceX’s plan.
Some of these Starlink satellites took video and images of Ship 42’s heat shield to check its health in preparation for today’s landing attempt. This footage, combined with ground cameras, showed that Ship 42 was in good condition and ready for its big moment.
SpaceX plans to use Starship to build an even larger LEO network than the Starlink V3 system – Starmind, an AI data center constellation that will house a million spaceshipsaccording to Elon Musk. (For context: the current generation of SpaceX Star link the network currently employs approximately 11,000 satellites.)
Assembling these megaconstellations will require an incredible launch rate. According to SpaceX, the dual wand latch is key to this vision, as it will enable faster inspection, refurbishment and reflight of the spacecraft.
The company will therefore undoubtedly try the maneuver again soon, probably during the next Starship flight, which will not be very far away.
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 8 a.m. EST to include new details about SpaceX’s Starship Flight 15 mission. Tariq Malik, editor-in-chief of Space.com, contributed to this report. It was updated again at 4:45 p.m. ET on November 14 with news of a successful capture of the ship.
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