This historic feat occurred during the Starship's fifth test flight
Anand Mahindra, Chairman of the Mahindra Group, took to X to praise Elon Musk's historic achievement with SpaceX's Starship rocket. The industrialist shared a breathtaking video clip capturing the moment when Elon Musk's Starship rocket successfully returned to its launch tower. The footage showed the lower half of the rocket expertly manoeuvring back to its launch site, ending in a seamless catch by a massive pair of mechanical arms. This historic feat occurred during the Starship's fifth test flight, marking a significant milestone in reusable space technology.
Hailing SpaceX's engineering prowess, Mr Mahindra tweeted, ''And this Sunday, I'm happy to be a couch potato, if it means that I get to watch history being made. This experiment may just be the critical moment when space travel was democratised and made routine. Where can I buy my ticket, @elonmusk?''
See the post here:
SpaceX successfully "caught" the first-stage booster of its Starship mega-rocket Sunday as it returned to the launch pad after a test flight, a world first in the company's quest for rapid reusability.
The "super heavy booster" had blasted off attached to the Starship rocket minutes earlier, then made a picture-perfect controlled return to the same pad in Texas, where a pair of huge mechanical "chopsticks" reached out from the launch tower to bring the slowly descending booster to a halt, according to a livestream from Elon Musk's SpaceX company. Not long afterwards, the upper stage of Starship splashed down, as planned, in the Indian Ocean.
US space agency NASA, which congratulated SpaceX on its successful test, is also keenly awaiting a modified version of Starship to act as a lander vehicle for crewed flights to the Moon under the Artemis programme later this decade.