{"id":4455,"date":"2026-11-15T09:03:45","date_gmt":"2026-11-15T04:03:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=4455"},"modified":"2026-11-15T09:03:45","modified_gmt":"2026-11-15T04:03:45","slug":"spacex-makes-history-as-starship-caught-by-giant-robotic-arms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=4455","title":{"rendered":"SpaceX makes history as Starship caught by giant robotic arms"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

SpaceX\u2019s Starship spacecraft<\/u><\/a> on Saturday returned from a 22-hour voyage in orbit and descended for the first time into the \u200bgrasp of giant mechanical arms at the Texas tower it was launched from a day earlier, a catch that is essential to the company\u2019s \u200cdecade-long effort to develop a fully reusable rocket.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The 171-foot-tall Starship fell out of thick clouds over SpaceX\u2019s Starbase launch site, reignited its engines to flip itself vertical and slowly descended into the tower\u2019s \u201cMechazilla\u201d arms, engines still roaring.<\/p>\n

Charred from the blazing heat of its return from space, the ship shut down its engines and hung still after the rocket system\u2019s longest mission yet.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was the missing link, the holy grail of \u200bspaceflight,\u201d SpaceX mission commentator Dan Huot said of the ship\u2019s catch.<\/p>\n

The towering two-stage rocket<\/u><\/a>\u2018s Super Heavy booster \u2014 the rocket\u2019s bottom half \u2014 carried Starship to space on Friday, \u200blifting off from SpaceX<\/u><\/a>\u2019s Starbase, Texas, facilities.<\/p>\n

That booster had failed to make a similar return to the launch pad some 10 minutes \u2060after liftoff, nixing SpaceX\u2019s plan to recover both parts of the rocket for the first time.<\/p>\n

But the Starship upper stage\u2019s successful return after orbiting Earth 14 times for 22.5 hours marked \u200ba key engineering milestone in the whirlwind, multibillion-dollar development of Starship, which billionaire Elon Musk<\/u><\/a> sees as the future workhorse for SpaceX\u2019s lucrative Starlink satellite business, as well as ambitions to \u200bput data centres in orbit, return humans to the moon and, eventually, settle on Mars.<\/p>\n

After deploying 26 Starlink satellites in orbit on Friday night while cruising at some 161 miles in altitude, Starship on Saturday fired one of its engines to begin an atmospheric plunge while flying eastward over the Pacific Ocean.<\/p>\n

It faced blistering heat as its orbital speed of some 17,000 miles per hour slowed to a supersonic free-fall \u200bin the skies above SpaceX\u2019s Starbase facilities on the Gulf Coast of south Texas.<\/p>\n

With its aerodynamic fins folded back, two small fittings near the top of Starship hooked onto the \u200blaunch tower\u2019s mechanical arms that had closed in to grasp it, allowing the vessel to hang a few hundred feet off the ground.<\/p>\n

Musk and SpaceX engineers began inspecting the ship within hours \u200cof its \u2060catch.<\/p>\n

\u201cShip 42 looks great!\u201d Musk wrote on X, posting photos and videos from the launch tower.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Rocket reusability<\/strong><\/h3>\n

SpaceX\u2019s dominance in the global launch industry is centred on its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which has launched over 700 times since 2010.<\/p>\n

That rocket\u2019s first stage is reusable, but its second stage \u2014 the part that delivers payloads into orbit \u2014 is discarded into the ocean after each flight.<\/p>\n

With Starship, Musk wants a rocket system that can fly to space and back in a manner and tempo akin to commercial aeroplanes, with \u200bminimal refurbishment between flights.<\/p>\n

Though Saturday\u2019s Starship recovery \u200bis a key milestone in that effort, \u2060SpaceX has yet to recover both Starship stages in a single mission, which would mark the first-ever return of an orbital launch system.<\/p>\n

And Starship\u2019s heat shield, composed of hundreds of black hexagonal tiles that protect it from the blazing heat of atmospheric reentry, is itself not yet fully reusable.<\/p>\n

SpaceX \u200bis trying to engineer new tile designs that will require little to no refurbishment after each mission.<\/p>\n

NASA\u2019s Space Shuttle system that \u200bferried astronauts to the \u2060International Space Station before its 2011 retirement was partially reusable; its external fuel tanks that got it off Earth were discarded after each flight.<\/p>\n

The reusable spacecraft itself had to go through extensive refurbishment before re-flying.<\/p>\n

SpaceX has spent more than $15 billion<\/u><\/a> on Starship\u2019s development.<\/p>\n

NASA has provided $3.2 billion as part of a contract valued at more than $4 billion that SpaceX won in 2021 to return \u2060humans to the \u200bMoon using Starship under the space agency\u2019s Artemis program.<\/p>\n

NASA expects Starship, along with another moon lander \u200bunder development by Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, to start crewed flights to the Moon in 2028, though several challenging development milestones remain with both mooncraft.<\/p>\n

For Starship, those milestones include demonstrating complex fuel transfers between Starship tanker \u200brockets in orbit, a critical process that will enable the ship to travel beyond Earth\u2019s orbit to the Moon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SpaceX\u2019s Starship spacecraft on Saturday returned from a 22-hour voyage in orbit and descended for the first time into the \u200bgrasp of giant mechanical arms at the Texas tower it was launched from a day earlier, a catch that is essential to the company\u2019s \u200cdecade-long effort to develop a fully reusable rocket. The 171-foot-tall Starship fell out of thick clouds over SpaceX\u2019s Starbase launch site, reignited its engines to flip itself vertical and slowly descended into the tower\u2019s \u201cMechazilla\u201d arms, engines still roaring. Charred from the blazing heat of its…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english"],"gutentor_comment":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4455\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}