SpaceX knows how to use chopsticks

SpaceX and Starship successfully played catch for the first time over the weekend, in a historic move reminiscent of Kevin Costner and his dad at the end of Field of Dreams.

On Sunday, SpaceX’s ~165 ft-tall Starship spacecraft took off from the launchpad on top of a 233 ft-tall Super Heavy Booster rocket.

Seven minutes after liftoff, the separated booster returned to the launchpad, guided by three of its 33 engines, where it was successfully caught by a set of mechanical arms SpaceX has nicknamed “chopsticks” in the space version of a trust fall. It was the first time the company had attempted this feat.

One small step for reusability

Other rocket operators, both historically and today, use expendable boosters, meaning the rocket is only used once to get payloads into orbit; a one-and-done, so to speak.

SpaceX, on the other hand, is focused on making Starship fully and rapidly reusable – and the “chopsticks” play an integral part in this strategy.

• The idea behind catching the booster is that, in the future, a Starship spacecraft making trips to the Moon or Mars could be stacked back on top of it on the pad and quickly launched again.

👀 Looking ahead… Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's second in command, said last year that engineers "designed Starship to be as much like aircraft operations as we possibly can get it ... We want to talk about dozens of launches a day, if not hundreds of launches a day.”