SpaceX’s historic Starship capture, and a student rocket landing

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October was a historic month for spaceflight, thanks in large part to SpaceX’s groundbreaking Starship Super Heavy booster catch.

On CEO Elon Musk’s advice, the private space company decided to catch Starship out of the sky using its Mechazilla launch tower’s “chopstick arms.”

While Musk thought it would take a few tries to get it right, SpaceX aced the historic maneuver on its first attempt. Only a few days later, a student-led team from Europe quietly made history itself – though a slice of cheese almost derailed their milestone rocket test. Let’s dive into the details.

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AEROSPACE ENGINEERING SPOTLIGHT

Starship’s booster catch was one for the history books

Early on Sunday, October 13, 2024, SpaceX made history.

Spectators watched on as Starship took to the skies for the fifth time. They then waited in anticipation as Starship’s first stage, Super Heavy, separated from the rocket’s upper stage and started its descent back down to Earth.

Starship is the world’s largest and most powerful rocket. The 33 Raptor engines attached to Super Heavy produce 17 million lbs of thrust at launch. The booster is roughly the size of a 20-story building.

Roughly seven minutes after launch, the hulking rocket stage lit up three of those 33 engines to initiate a descent burn. Incredibly, Super Heavy proceeded to deftly hover into position and descend into the metallic grasp of the Mechazilla launch tower’s “chopstick” arms. The crowd watched in awe and started cheering as it realized the rocket capture was a success.

But why catch Super Heavy out of the sky in the first place? It’s all down to the rocket’s mass. By catching Starship out of the sky, SpaceX removes the need for incredibly heavy landing legs.

Reducing this weight means more of Starship’s mass can be allocated towards payload and fuel. Catching Starship is also critical for SpaceX’s ability to redeploy the spacecraft quickly. The Mechazilla launch tower at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in southern Texas can quickly place Starship back on the launch mount for another mission.

Shortly after the October 13 flight test, Musk wrote on Twitter that “Starship is designed to achieve reflight of its rocket booster ultimately within an hour after liftoff. The booster returns within ~5 minutes, so the remaining time is reloading propellant and placing a ship on top of the booster.”

Flight test five was a massive milestone achievement for SpaceX. The successful rocket capture was an incredible feat of engineering. It brings SpaceX and Elon Musk one step closer to achieving their dream of making life multi-planetary.

AERO BULLETIN

Student rocket hop: How students beat Europe’s private space industry

Though it might not be on the same scale as SpaceX and Starship, a team of students performed an impressive milestone test of its own in October.

A team of students from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne co-founded the Gruyère Space Program (GSP) in 2018. On October 18, they successfully performed the first rocket hop test ever performed on European soil. Here are a few key facts showing why this is a historic achievement.

The first rocket hop test in Europe

On October 18, the student-led GSP team successfully performed a 105-metre free flight with its COLIBRI hopper rocket.

After COLIBRI’s launch, it flew to an altitude of 105 meters. It then flew 30 meters southeast before returning to the launchpad and performing a successful landing. The flight test lasted a total of 60 seconds.

Europe’s Arianespace recently delayed its Themis hop test

The reason this hop test is a historic achievement is that no entity in Europe has ever performed a successful rocket hop test. Neither the European Space Agency, nor any private European space company has performed this reusability milestone to date.

Hop tests are crucial for reusability

Anyone who has followed SpaceX’s development of Falcon 9 and Starship will know that hop tests are a crucial stepping stone for reusability. They allow engineers to test their vector thrust control capabilities, as well as their engine's ability to launch a rocket over several cycles.

Cheese almost caused GSP’s rocket to crash

Amazingly, a slice of cheese almost foiled GSP’s hop test. In an interview with Interesting Engineering, GSP president Jérémy Marciacq explained that a slice of Gruyère attached to one of the hopper’s landing legs “almost caused a disaster”.

Thankfully, the cheeky stunt didn’t end up with rocket de-Brie scattered near the launch site. COLIBRI was still able to land and the engineers could eat the warm cheese that hitched a ride aboard the historic hopper.