After 7 years, 42 ships, and 22 boosters, hard work and persistent iterative development succeeded today in recovering a Starship from orbit, catching it falling from the sky, a moment many of us have long dreamed of. Toward full and rapid reusability, which promises to revolutionize rocketry, booster stages have previously been landed or caught and reused, but recovering upper stages from Earth orbit is much harder due to their greater altitude and much higher speed. (Just restarting a Starship Raptor full-flow staged-combustion cryogenic rocket engine to de-orbit after 20 hours in space is itself a major achievement.)
SpaceX Communication Manager Dan Huot remarked, “That was the missing link, that was the holy grail of spaceflight, plummeting through fire to be snatched out of the air by steel. We caught a Starship, and now everything changes.” SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gywnne Shotwell called it “alien-level technology from this star system’s finest team.”
Congratulations SpaceX, and thanks for so publicly sharing this epic adventure!
