For the 2nd time in history, a spaceflight company has caught a ~250 ton rocket booster on its way back on Earth.
Today, Elon Musk’s SpaceX demonstrated another perfect Super Heavy booster landing catch during the Flight 7 Starship launch test (IFT-7) at Starbase, Texas.
Elon Musk took to his social media platform X (Twitter) to post the stunning footage of the landing catch of Flight 7 booster. The sight of the rocket booster catch is always exciting and is worthy of multiple replays — let’s watch.
In case the launch tower Chopsticks are not able to catch the Super Heavy booster, it will end up in a disaster because the Super Heavy rocket booster does not have landing legs and they are designed to be caught instead of land on surface.
However, SpaceX successfully caught Flight 7 rocket booster and there was no mishap. There are thousands of live assessments during the flight, reentry, and landing before SpaceX decides to catch the booster. Last time in Flight 6, SpaceX landed the booster in the Gulf of Mexico instead of catching it.
Although SpaceX successfully caught the booster on its landing, the upper stage Ship 33 was lost and ended in a RUD.
SpaceX also shared the video compilation of Flight 7 booster’s landing catch via its official X account.
Related: Starship Flight 7 live updates archive and recorded live stream archive here
Related Starship News
- SpaceX prepares for Starship’s 10th flight, conducts a static fire test on Booster 16, Starbase updates
- Trump to cancel SpaceX contracts, Musk retracts from decommissioning the Dragon spacecraft program
- Starship Flight 9 test: SpaceX misses major objectives, launch cadence to increase, says Musk
- Starship Flight 9 launch live updates, Watch the live streams here (archived)
- SpaceX mounts Flight 9 Starship onto the OLM, shares the landing plan, and stunning views ahead of launch
- SpaceX announces Flight 9 Starship launch date, here’s the list of backup windows, improvements, and final tests
