SpaceX Catches the Starship to end Flight 15

Insane achievement! It is the dawn of a new era! One that has been 10+ years in the making.

If this makes even me want to go study engineering I know it will inspire millions of youngsters into making the future we all want. Bravo!

I like that they wrote "dont panic" on the fuselage above the s42 badge

The engineering of this is just bind boggling awesome. The culmination of so many fields, so many factors, to this. Congrats!!!

So precise it was almost boring - incredible work. Kudos.

Watched it with my 5 year old daughter (3 year old son was sadly uninterested), and we were both cheering and high fiving. Very exciting.

Congratulations to the steely eyed missile men and women of SpaceX.

I imagine this is what it was like to witness Apollo 11 55 years ago.

This is absolutely incredible!! I can’t wrap my head around this.

Do we know why they didn't try to catch the booster?

Holy ship, it was picture perfect capture!

That was incredible to watch!

Huge congratulations to the team.

Ah man I just missed it. The live feed is just stock footage. Any links to the catch?

Damned impressive.

The heat shield looks very good. Excited to see how much work it will take to fly this again. I'm in awe. I like the future sometimes.

That was incredible impressive, what a feat of engineering!

The most amazing thing i've seen in a while.

We witnessed history today

Legendary ♥

Holy cow.

It's difficult to underline how huge this is. This marks the first time in the history of rocketry that the upper stage of a rocket has returned home from orbit to a safe, upright landing.

(And to preempt the obvious objection: yes, maybe you can call the Space Shuttle an "upper stage of a rocket" if you squint hard enough, but it didn't do upright landings, its external tank was not reusable and even the Shuttle itself was effectively rebuilt from scratch at exorbitant cost each time.)

It's sad to see a lot of media missing the point, eg as I type this BBC is reporting this as "SpaceX successfully catches part of Starship rocket on its return to Earth".

Edit: corrected to note that the SRBs were reusable, but the ET was not.

Congrats to the engineers.

(But lose the bastard at the top, OK?)

It's very impressive

Best thing ever built and it works!!!

How many years until the next milestones?

- in orbit refueling

- moon landing

- Mars rendez-vous

- Mars landing

- humans on Mars

Nah, the game is to put data centers in space. Plus the Space Force dreams.

Magical era. What a feat!

i wonder how much fuel was left over after landing? What is their safety margin in seconds of burn remaining?

From Wernher von Braun to Elon Musk... It seems we're living in a Mel Brooks movie (with the funny parts removed).

New tech tree unlocked for humanity.

Feels good.

Damn, that looked smooth and glorious. This is how I'd like the future to be.

This achievement likely changes the course of life in this solar system.

SpaceX made me watch engineering feats live on stream. I love it!

This is exactly the most impressive feat of engineering I have ever seen.

Only catching both the booster and the rocket would top this one. But the rocket only being caught is still impressive regardless.

SpaceX below $1T is criminally undervalued.

It's just mostly newtonian physics ... nice job but not that impressive. With the right investments we could have done this decades ago.

perfect. hyperbole failure moment

Impressive how reliable they've made those engines!

Kind of crazy to reduce the hardware on ship so much and move so much complexity to the ground. This can really only happen in a situation where anybody can throw out any dumb idea, because if you suggested this 20 years ago people would think you are an idiot.

Reusable stages is very neat, but seems a little crazy to pay the tyranny of the rocket equation twice. I heard one person say that carrying fuel to land over the whole flight means it takes 23x more launches to get an equivalent payload to orbit.

Using modern technology, couldn't disposable first stages be produced much more cheaply than during the space race?

How much of modern manufacturing disposable booster's cost would be fuel vs metal?

Do we just look past the failed primary booster objective? (I didn't write the brief)

Edit: Yes, ignore that bit.

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