Historic moment! SpaceX's starship completes its first 'chopsticks catch' of a rocket.

On October 13 local time, at the Boca Chica Starship Base in Texas, Elon Musk's American aerospace technology company SpaceX conducted the fifth test flight of the starship, achieving a historic success.

After the successful liftoff of the starship, the mechanical arm of the launch tower successfully captured the super heavy booster returning to the ground, achieving an important milestone in the starship becoming a fully reusable rocket system.

Due to its elongated shape compared to other aerospace equipment, SpaceX named the recovery mechanism's mechanical arm 'Chopsticks', so the scene of mid-air recovery has also been vividly described by major media as 'chopsticks catching the rocket'.

A major milestone in space history! How difficult is the 'chopsticks recovery'?

It is reported that the starship system is mainly divided into two stages: the first stage is the bottom super heavy booster, and the second stage is the top starship spacecraft.

And as the fifth test flight, the main purpose of this test flight is for the starship spacecraft to return to Earth and land in the Indian Ocean after entering the atmosphere, and to attempt the first booster recovery.

The live broadcast showed that after burning most of the fuel and separating from the first stage rocket, this approximately 232-foot (71 meters) tall, 33-engine heavy-duty booster began its high-altitude landing and slowly approached the launch tower.

After multiple decelerations, the slightly tilted "super heavy-duty" booster was accurately "embraced" by the two mechanical arms extended by the launch tower in mid-air, smoothly completing this highly difficult mid-air recovery.

According to SpaceX's official information, the bottom of the heavy-duty booster is equipped with 33 engines, each more powerful than any of the 9 engines of the previous generation Falcon Raptors, with a liftoff thrust approximately 10 times that of Falcon.

On the other hand, after entering the atmosphere, the Starship spacecraft began to glow, eventually successfully splashing down vertically in the Indian Ocean and exploding, almost perfectly hitting the designated landing spot.

At this point, SpaceX has successfully achieved its two main goals in the fifth flight (precise landing and booster recovery).

According to comprehensive reports, the difficulty of mid-air booster recovery is extremely high, and Musk had previously predicted that the first success rate of "catching rockets with chopsticks" was only 50%.

The official website information shows that SpaceX's standard for recovering heavy-duty boosters is that "meeting the criteria for capturing the rocket requires thousands of specifications", and "any deviation in data will cause the booster to deviate from its return trajectory and fall into the coastal areas of the Gulf of Mexico".

Considering the high risk of this mission, SpaceX explicitly mentioned that if any abnormalities affecting the normal recovery and capture of the launch tower are found during this "Starship" launch, they will revert to the original ocean soft landing method.

During a July online interview, Musk stated that SpaceX's mission this time "sounds a bit crazy," although it "has a good chance of success."

"We did not break physics, so success is one of the possible outcomes."

The company's official website also shows that, in response to the previous four flights' "heat shield tile shedding" problem, SpaceX has "completely overhauled its heat shield, with SpaceX technicians spending over 12,000 hours replacing the entire heat shield system with new generation tiles, spare ablation layers, and additional protection between the fin structures."

Efficient reuse, Musk's pie in the sky coming true

For Musk's "Mars plan" and NASA's Artemis manned space program, the Starship system is crucial, and the reason for attempting to recover and reuse boosters is mainly to reduce costs.

According to reports from Chinese websites, currently SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket booster uses mature landing leg recovery technology, with a very high success rate. However, the drawback is that subsequent reuse is more complicated, requiring long-distance transportation from the landing site, which cannot meet SpaceX's high-frequency launch demands.

While the "chopstick-clamping rocket" has a high technological difficulty, after rocket recovery, it can directly dock with the launch tower, allowing subsequent checks, refueling, and other steps to be carried out directly, greatly reducing launch preparation time.

In September 2016, Musk gave a speech at the International Astronautical Congress held in Mexico, presenting the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) for Mars colonization.

In the meantime, Musk stated that this is not a one-way ticket, each ITS spacecraft may be able to fly dozens of times, and the booster should be reused.

In September this year, Musk announced on X that he plans to launch approximately five unmanned interstellar spacecraft missions to Mars in the next two years, followed by possible manned missions.

Editor/Somer