In an engineering feat, mechanical SpaceX arms catch Starship rocket booster back at the launch pad

That was quite astounding. Proper Star Trek stuff.

What could possibly go wrong...?

Banthu

Impressive engineering.

Musk is helping to Make America Great Again.

After Musk's Robotaxi event, there was a large Tesla stock selloff. Nobody thinks he can deliver. My advice would be sell any Tesla stock you have. Also, prior to the event 4 senior executives left the company, including the global vehicle automation and safety policy lead.

Japan needs to set the table to attract people like Elon and to allow domestic "Elons."

musk didn’t do it, engineers and gwynne shotwell did.

gwynne shotwell is the president, coo and person who has driven spacex. she’s highly respected by nasa and the space industry and one of the most influential engineer, project manager and business development person in the world.

you maga nuts think she’s a dei hire and should be in the kitchen baking cookies, right?

Peter NeilToday  07:17 pm JST

musk didn’t do it, engineers and gwynne shotwell did.

gwynne shotwell is the president, coo and person who has driven spacex. she’s highly respected by nasa and the space industry and one of the most influential engineer, project manager and business development person in the world.

you maga nuts think she’s a dei hire and should be in the kitchen baking cookies, right?

Sour grapes. Without Musk backing it, the project never would've got off the ground. So to speak.

UnderworldToday  08:29 am JST

Banthu

Impressive engineering.

Musk is helping to Make America Great Again.

After Musk's Robotaxi event, there was a large Tesla stock selloff. Nobody thinks he can deliver. My advice would be sell any Tesla stock you have. Also, prior to the event 4 senior executives left the company, including the global vehicle automation and safety policy lead.

Try and fail, but at least he's having a go. What've you done?

Bad HaircutToday  08:16 pm JST

Peter NeilToday  07:17 pm JST

musk didn’t do it, engineers and gwynne shotwell did.

gwynne shotwell is the president, coo and person who has driven spacex. she’s highly respected by nasa and the space industry and one of the most influential engineer, project manager and business development person in the world.

you maga nuts think she’s a dei hire and should be in the kitchen baking cookies, right?

“Sour grapes. Without Musk backing it, the project never would've got off the ground. So to speak.”

she is the one who got the 93 investors and government contracts, starting in 2002.

musk likes to take credit for everything, but doesn’t do the hard work to get it done.

Elon Musk was the technical chief engineer when SpaceX was about to fail.

Whatever happens next is due to him, whether one likes or not.

He is the one to put great persons at the right place, women or men, white or black.

Not everyone is as open-minded as he is.

Space X is a system of try and fail foe the better, best science method for research and future success.

she is the one who got the 93 investors and government contracts, starting in 2002.

musk likes to take credit for everything, but doesn’t do the hard work to get it done.

Are you saying that it would've gone ahead for sure if he hadn't been involved?

I bet this wouldn't have bothered you if Musk had backed the Democrats and kept Twitter as it had been before.

SpaceX pulled off the boldest test flight yet of its enormous Starship rocket on Sunday, catching the returning booster back at the launch pad with mechanical arms.

A jubilant Elon Musk called it “science fiction without the fiction part.”

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“The tower has caught the rocket!!” Musk announced via X. “Big step towards making life multiplanetary was made today.”

•

I don't think people in general have any idea of ​​the magnitude of this feat and what it means for the future of humanity (this is partly due to the MSM’s hesitation in covering and praising Elon Musk (and we all know why)).

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Elon Musk:

“ The strong gravity of Earth makes the physics of a fully reusable rocket with positive payload margin extremely difficult to solve, which is why it has never been done before.

Removing the mass of landing legs from the booster and ship by making the tower do the work of final velocity attenuation greatly improves payload margin.

This architecture also simultaneously substantially increases launch cadence, because the same arms that lift the booster and ship onto the launch stand also catch them, allowing immediate placement of the booster back on the launch stand and the ship back on top of the booster. “

…

…

“ I started reading quite a bit about rockets to try to understand why they're so freaking expensive.

Where does the $60 million go for the Delta II? Now Delta II, I think, is $100 million or something, some crazy number. And Delta II is a relatively small rocket. If you go to one of the bigger rockets, it's anywhere from $200 to $400 million.

I came to the conclusion that there wasn't really a good reason for rockets to be so expensive, and that they could be a lot less.

Even in an expendable format, they could be less.

And that if one could make them reusable, like airplanes, then the cost of rocketry would drop dramatically, the cost of space travel would drop dramatically.

Because the cost of the fuel was maybe anywhere from 0.2% to 0.5% of the cost of the rocket.

It's like a plane. How much is the cost of the fuel in the plane versus the plane itself? It's at least a two-order-of-magnitude difference.

But nobody had really been able to make a reusable rocket work. So I thought, if we can do that, then that would really be the key breakthrough for space travel. “

How is everyone else's private space industry fairing?