SpaceX surely is successful in achieving milestones with its groundbreaking technology that turns fanciful ideas into reality. It is the first private company to develop a liquid-propellant rocket (Falcon 9) that has reached orbit and has also successfully launched (Falcon 9) that orbited and recovered a spacecraft (Dragon).
On Sunday, the rocket giant achieved another incredible feat of engineering when it launched the fifth test flight of its gigantic Starship rocket. It then caught the booster back at the launch pad in Texas with mechanical arms seven minutes later.
This was one of the high-risk flights because it launched a gigantic 23-story tall Super Heavy-Starship rocket on an unpiloted test flight. And then using giant “mechazilla” mechanical arms colloquially called “chopsticks” on the pad gantry to pluck the descending first stage out of the sky.
The experimental flight commenced at a rumbling liftoff of the 398-foot-tall (121.3-meter) starship rocket at 7:25 am CDT (12:25 UTC) from the launch site of SpaceX’s star base in South Texas. It is just a few miles north of the US- Mexico border. The rocket’s Super Heavy booster stage fired 33 Raptor engines, rendering nearly 17 million pounds of thrust and gulping 20 tons of methane and liquid oxygen propellants per second at full throttle.
This is equivalent to twice the power of NASA’s Saturn V rocket, which was utilized to send astronauts to the Moon more than 50 years ago.
“Big step towards making life multi-planetary was made today,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk said on his social media platform X.
The achievement was indefinitely the first of its kind and important for SpaceX as it plans to keep reusing the starship rocket, enabling human expeditions to the moon and Mars, and routine access to space for mind-bogglingly massive payloads. No doubt, these are novel capabilities that no other company or country seems close to being capable of achieving.
