Yesterday was the fifth test flight of the Starship from SpaceX. What made this one unique is that the Super Heavy booster that launches the vehicle (Starship) into space, was to be attempted to be caught out of mid air by what SpaceX calls Mechazilla. The Super Heavy booster alone is over 230 feet tall. This is crazy, its like catching a 23 story building out of mid-air with what looks like chopsticks.
Watching this happen was really breathtaking. This is the first time in history anything like this has been attempted and they succeeded on their first try. The video below shows the entire flight. The whole rocket assembly is just shy of 400 feet tall (taller than the Saturn V that sent humans to the moon by over 30 feet). Watching this thing take off is pretty exhilarating, and just a few minutes in the Starships engines ignite while still connected to the booster, they detach, and as the Starship propels away, the booster performs and acrobatic flip to return to the exact same launch pad from where it just took off. Watching the booster return through the clouds in the video below is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. Anything could go wrong and cause catastrophic damage to the landing pad, and it comes in so hot. But watching it land on the chopsticks was very surreal. This is the ship that is supposed to take humans to Mars (according to Elon - as soon as 4 years from now). Again, not a fan of Elon - but he didn't design this rocket. He may own SpaceX, but this is just an incredible feat of human engineering that it's hard not to smile about - even if you feel certain ways about the man behind the company. I obviously want humans to return to the Moon, to Mars, and beyond - and this is another small step in that direction.
The booster catch was the high point of the flight, but there was still the actual Starship flight that continued. It flew for some time before re-entry to test their updates to the heat shield (as it had some points of failure on the last test flight). The camera feed was pretty amazing during this part as well. Watch the plasma build up and the white & red pure heat flowing off the sides. Towards the end of the decent, you can see clear signs of heat damage to one of the flaps and a red glowing hole starts to grow where their should not be one. The landing was a test vertical "soft landing" splash down in the ocean, meaning they would approach as if it was a vertical landing, but did not plan on salvaging the ship post-flight. The damage to the wing flaps did not appear to impact this, as the the rocket slowed its decent and seemingly softly landed up right in the ocean (it was hard to see from the darkness in the video feed). However, only a couple seconds after successful "landing" the ship exploded in a spectacular "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly".
The whole thing was just fun, I love nerding out to these rocket launches. We are watching history be made on multiple fronts, seeing feats of engineering that will be talked about hundreds of years in the future - all by a private company. NASA has already ordered 2 Starships to take Astronauts and supplies to the Moon, and as I mentioned earlier, SpaceX plans to use Starship to take humans to Mars - all within the next decade or so. The space race is back. Watch the full video of the flight from SpaceX's Twitter (X) account below:
Also fun fact:
On SpaceX's website - they've added a little lander game to simulate the flight in an 8-bit flappy bird looking style. The loading screen says "Pending Regulatory Approval" as it loads which pokes fun at the drama they've been having while awaiting approval from the FAA. It challenges you to not run out of fuel, and "avoid the aliens" where you have to dodge little flying saucers on your way down. It's actually kind of fun, you can play here: https://starshipthegame.spacex.com/