Starship is about to launch on its fifth flight, and this time there’s a catch
“We’ll see the booster fly back and land at the tower and be captured by the arms, or we’ll take out the tower.”
Early Sunday morning, SpaceX will try something no one has ever done before. Around seven minutes after lifting off from South Texas, the huge stainless steel booster from SpaceX’s Starship rocket will, if all goes according to plan, come back to the launch pad and slow to a hover, allowing powerful mechanical arms to capture it in midair.
This is SpaceX’s approach to recovering Starship’s Super Heavy booster. If it works, this method will make it easier and faster to reuse the rocket than it is to recycle boosters from SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 launch vehicle. Falcon 9’s boosters usually come down on a floating drone ship stationed hundreds of miles out to sea, requiring SpaceX to return the rocket to shore for refurbishment.
“We’re going for high reusability,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability.