SpaceX's Starship 'chopstick landing' technique just made every Kerbal Space Program enthusiast go green with envy
Kerbal Space Program is one of those games where, if you caught the bug, it never really left you. I still sometimes fall asleep at night envisioning new and creative ways to build rockets that fail miserably, despite not having touched the game for well over a year now.
Watching the latest SpaceX Starship booster return footage though, I felt that familiar itch return again (via BBC News). Elon Musk's pet space project has achieved many remarkable feats in the past few years, but manoeuvring a Super Heavy rocket booster down to a launch pad under its own power, turning upright on its end, and then catching it with a pair of chopsticks in mid-air in a perfect display of tech ballet really strikes as a breakthrough moment for spaceflight.
What makes this even more impressive? It was the first proper attempt at this rocket booster capture method and one that SpaceX's engineers thought was something of a long shot. After all, the company has taken the tech industry approach of «move fast, break stuff» to something of an extreme in previous attempts to both launch and land its rocket boosters, and this new 'mid-air catch' method looked like its most ambitious version to date.
That's compounded by the fact that, a mere 18 months ago, Starship's inaugural flight ended in, well, an explosion. Now here it is (or at least a part of it, anyway), gently boosting itself back down to Earth like physics is no big deal.
Just two minutes before landing, final checks were still being made to determine whether the attempt was possible, or whether it was better to bail out and dump the booster in the Gulf of Mexico.
Still, the call was made, and the audible cheers from the SpaceX team and observers are enough to send a genuine shiver down the spine as the booster first slows its descent, then manoeuvres itself gently into position, before being clamped into place.
As for the ship section (which eventually, Musk and his engineers hope will take a crew to the Moon, Mars, and
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