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What's next for SpaceX's Starship after epic Flight 15 chopsticks catch?
Starship still has some work to do before it's fully up and running.
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Starship may have just made history, but it still has some work to do to get fully up and running.
The megarocket launched on its 15th test flight on Friday (Nov. 13), aiming to pull off a dramatic and unprecedented twofer. SpaceX wanted to bring both Starship elements — its Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage — back to the launch pad at its Starbase site in Texas to be caught by the tower's "chopstick" arms.
It didn't happen with Super Heavy; the booster diverted to a Gulf of Mexico splashdown on Friday evening after experiencing a low-fuel alarm. But Ship came home successfully, nestling into the tower's arms in a soft and unprecedented embrace on Saturday afternoon (Nov. 14), 22.5 hours after lifting off.
SpaceX has caught Super Heavy on three test flights to date. But it had never caught a Ship before; indeed, it had never even tried before Saturday. It's tougher and riskier to catch Ship; the upper stage flies much higher and faster than Super Heavy, so its return trip is much more more involved.
Saturday was therefore a very big day for the company.
"That was the holy grail of spaceflight, plummeting through fire to be snatched out of the air by steel," SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said during the company's landing webcast on Saturday. "We caught a Starship, and now everything changes."
The Flight 15 mission plan gave us a sneak peek at the future: The double catch will be standard on operational Starship missions, as this recovery strategy will enable rapid inspection, refurbishment and reflight of the megarocket, according to SpaceX.
And the company is indeed planning on rapid reflight. Elon Musk has said that SpaceX is targeting 10,000 Starship launches per year by 2030, which works out to more than one liftoff every hour on average.