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Japan will launch the Emirati asteroid mission:

They fucking caught the booster!!!!!

It's extremely difficult to comprehend exactly how huge this booster is.

It looks like a toy in the shots. It's actually a 25 story skyscraper landing on a pair of giant chopsticks.


edit: and the ship landed right on target too!

SlothmanAllen said:

They fucking caught the booster!!!!!

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1845442658203734384

Click to expand...

This looks exactly like a scene from a sci-fi movie when the booster is caught.

Launch and catch of the booster



The ship

A reminder, the whole booster is designed to land and stay suspended on those little pins.

That was indeed impressive.

If this doesn't start to change some of the planning priorities of a few national space agencies around the world, I don't know what else will.

Amazing first person view of the catch. You can actually see the Starship slides between the two chopsticks while it is still descending. The level of precision is amazing.


Booster after being caught. Can see some damage to the aero strucuture. Looks like some of the cladding melted or fell off.


Just the fact they have managed to light that many engines simultaneously and now consistently is an achievement. No you add in the fact that they caught the booster on the first try.

Musk might be an idiot, but it is clear that the engineers at SpaceX are the best in the world at what they do.

If a reusable Starship can be operational to any extent in the next couple of years, a 10 year advantage at least compared with CZ 9 represents a huge gap differential in payload to orbit capacity that should not be acceptable from a military/national strategic point of view. This is all about anti-sat capability now, not about who gets back to the moon first.