Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster!
Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster!
@SpaceX: Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster!
There was a lot of extra fire at the end, but it looked amazing.
It's going both way slower than expected, but progress is also super rapid. This is exactly what they needed to get going with the Artemis moon landing. Without this catch they'd never be able to refuel cost effectively.
It looks like some small pieces blew off the booster and there was a little fire at the end, but they recovered it and can work on solving that for the next flight. What a catch.
Can you imagine going back to the Apollo era and showing them this video and going just land it on the launch pad again. Obvious really.
Insane. Just insane:
That's completely mental... Space X engineers are phenomenal.
Watching it was incredible, however not surprising. This is just an evolution of what SpaceX has gotten good at. They're "just" changed the point where it stops, with less stress on the rocket and less parts to fail (the landing gear). I know there's a lot of complexity behind it working, this isn't downplaying the effort. It's applauding how they're slowly making reusable rockets common.
The thing is they're the only people working on reusable rockets even NASA have given up with the idea (after barely even trying).
So every milestone increases the likelihood that will get more reusable rockets now that they've proven the concept in sound.
I wouldn’t say they are the only ones, New Glen is supposed to be a partially reusable rocket.
Others like Rocket Lab are working on smaller “printable” rockets. So there is definitely a lot of innovation going on in the industry.