Among the many companies that bear the Elon Musk seal, SpaceX is becoming a reference for the entire world. Their latest demonstration of technological and scientific progress makes it clear, once again, that you may more or less like how they break the taboos of the sector, but it is obvious that they are achieving great things. For many experts, they are capable of real feats.
Last weekend SpaceX’s X profile was smoking. There was an attempt to make history with a maneuver that could go around the world. And the company has taken advantage of having all the spotlights on it. Because, having already left the explosions and failures of the past buried in the news, what they have done is triumph.
Worthy of a movie
If you take a look at the video, which we leave you embedded below so that you can see it from Elon Musk’s own publication, you will be surprised. We must be objective and recognize that SpaceX made mistakes in the past and that its tests did not always go well. But lately they are nailing every single progress they are trying to make. The margin of success is enormous and, when they fail, as happened slightly recently, they react quickly to find out what happened.
Elon Musk
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Starship rocket booster caught by tower https://t.co/aOQmSkt6YE
October 13, 2024 • 16:10
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That the SpaceX tower had the capacity to grab the company’s booster rocket as it descended to Earth was something that was on the roadmap. It had to happen, as it would hugely change the way your technology is reused and resources saved. It is no longer a question of calculating where the propellant will fall, but of catching it when it falls as if it were descending to land on a cloud of cotton balls. And everything may seem disproportionate, but the video is pure poetry. Achieving that level of precision with the enormous weight of the rocket and the force involved seems impossible.
Gently and carefully
There is something, while we are watching the video, that makes it look like an animation, something that has not happened and is simply being generated before us. It is nothing other than that delicacy with which the 70 meter high rocket, a building in itself, falls from the sky and approaches the tower so that it can be held carefully and thus remains stable. The tower has two arms and a lower base that ensure that the rocket booster is safely stored and that SpaceX already has it ready, to a certain extent, to use it again.
The most striking thing is that this was SpaceX’s first attempt to grab the rocket. To achieve this, the company itself highlights the enormous effort made by different engineers and specialists, who have surely put many hours of effort into the process. Before the end of the year, SpaceX will repeat the test to see if everything goes well again. It will be something important, since the reuse of this Super Heavy Booster is crucial in the entity’s long-term plans.
They need to be able to make many launches, recover the booster rockets and thus continue with the process. In the short term, the next big goal is NASA’s Artemis III mission. In it, this booster rocket will be used to take the Starship Human Landing System to the orbit of the Moon. It will be a modified version of Starship in which four astronauts will travel. But even if this project is already ambitious in itself, Elon Musk is still looking further afield.
Their latest statements, which combine optimism, fantasy and science, suggest that the important progress they have made with the capture of the rocket booster in flight will set the course for multiplanetary life. Because what the executive already envisions is a future in which humans travel to other planets to start lives outside of Earth. That the rocket booster can be recovered effectively and quickly will help make it easier to send ships and ships. That still remains to be done and, of course, it seems impossible. But as we said, SpaceX is showing that the term impossible, lately, is becoming a bit obsolete.
