SpaceX successfully captures Starship rocket booster in rare engineering feat | World News

Elon Musk’s SpaceX accomplished a monumental feat on Sunday when it successfully used a mechanical arm on its launch pad to intercept a booster returning to the back of a Starship rocket.

This is the first time the company has recovered a rocket booster on the launch pad rather than landing it on a floating offshore platform. SpaceX has used this method to recover the first stage booster of its Falcon 9 small rocket for nearly nine years.

Musk shared an astonishing video of that exact moment on his social media platform X. The Starship rocket’s return booster was safely captured by the launch pad’s mechanical arm seven minutes after liftoff. The launch tower was equipped with a giant metal arm called a “chopstick” that caught the booster as it descended 71 meters (232 feet) high.

The company’s engineers were thrilled with their feat. “Even in this day and age, what we saw was magic. I’m shaking right now,” said SpaceX’s Dan Fott, who observed the landing from near the launch site.

“Folks, today is the day the engineering history books are published,” added SpaceX’s Kate Tice from SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

The first successful recovery of the launch pad itself has sparked hopes among space tourism and space enthusiasts for safe landings on Earth upon return.

India’s Anand Mahindra expressed his excitement in a post for ‘X’. This experiment may be the defining moment in the democratization and normalization of space travel. Where can I buy tickets, @elonmusk?,” he wrote.

SpaceX achieved this feat during the fifth test flight of its Starship rocket. The “catch landing” method is the company’s latest advancement in its quest to develop fully reusable rockets that can lift more cargo into space orbit. Musk also envisions using reusable launch vehicles to take humans to the moon and eventually Mars.

(Information provided by Associated Press and Reuters)