SpaceX catches Starship with giant 'chopstick' arms in fresh leap for reusable rockets

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SpaceX's Starship spacecraft has returned from its longest flight in orbit yet to the Texas launch tower it was launched from a day prior, demonstrating the first key recovery of…

SpaceX's Starship spacecraft has returned from its longest flight in orbit yet to the Texas launch tower it was launched from a day prior, demonstrating the first key recovery of the rocket system's centrepiece vessel in the company's decade-long effort to develop a fully reusable rocket.

The towering two-stage rocket's Super Heavy booster - the rocket's bottom half - carried Starship to space on Friday, lifting off from SpaceX's Starbase, Texas, facilities. That booster had failed to make a similar return to the launch pad some 10 minutes after liftoff, nixing SpaceX's plan to recover both parts of the rocket for the first time.

But the Starship upper stage's successful return after orbiting Earth 14 times for over 22 hours marked a key engineering milestone in the whirlwind, multibillion-dollar development of Starship, which billionaire Elon Musk sees as the future workhorse for SpaceX's satellite business and ambitions to put humans on the moon and eventually Mars.

After deploying 26 Starlink satellites in orbit Friday night while cruising some 161 miles (260km) in altitude, Starship on Saturday (local time) fired one of its engines to begin an atmospheric plunge. It faced blistering heat as its orbital speed of some 17,000 miles (about 27,350km) per hour slowed to a supersonic free-fall in the skies above SpaceX's Starbase facilities on the Gulf coast of south Texas.

The spacecraft then reignited three engines to flip itself in a vertical position and steer itself toward the launch tower, where two mechanical "chopstick" arms clasped onto the spacecraft as it hovered in place.

SpaceX's dominance in the global launch industry is centred on its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which has launched over 700 times since 2010. That rocket's first stage is reusable, but its second stage - the part that delivers payloads into orbit - is discarded into the ocean after each flight.

With Starship, Musk wants a rocket system that can fly to space and back in a manner and tempo akin to…

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