Landing rocket boosters post-flight is a feat SpaceX has mastered with its smaller work rocket, the Falcon 9. Boosters from this rocket made soft landings on sea platforms or ground platforms after more than 330 launches – so these vehicles could be renovated and flown again. SpaceX says this has reduced costs, allowing the company to undercut the rest of the rocket market.

However, Starship is a far more powerful and complex system.

With 33 engines at the base, each more powerful than any of the nine engines used in the Falcon, the Super Heavy booster provides approximately ten times the thrust at launch.

Instead of attaching the landing legs to the side of the Super Heavy, as they adorn a Falcon 9’s launch vehicle, SpaceX instead built a special tower to support the Super Heavy’s return back to solid ground, in the hopes that it would still speed up the recovery process becomes faster.

The tower, dubbed “Mechazilla” by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk for its resemblance to a metallic Godzilla, has massive metal arms. The arms, or “chopsticks,” can be used to stack and move boosters and spacecraft at the launch site before launch — and they are essentially designed to catch the vehicles in the air as they return to Earth.

Musk’s vision is that the rod arms will ultimately be able to simply turn around and place a rocket back on the launch pad within minutes of its return – allowing the vehicle to take off again after refueling – perhaps as early as 30 minutes after landing, the CEO said in one Interview on June 5th.

It’s a bold vision. And SpaceX is still in the early stages of figuring out exactly how the catch will work.

Musk admitted in a July interview posted to YouTube that SpaceX’s goal for this flight “sounds kind of crazy,” although it “has a good chance of working.”

“We’re not breaking physics,” he said, “so success is one of the possible outcomes here.”

According to the company’s website, SpaceX will only attempt to capture the Super Heavy launcher if “thousands of different vehicle and landing surface criteria are met,” which requires “intact systems on the launch vehicle and tower, as well as a manual command from the mission’s flight director.” ”

If the attempt is waved off, Super Heavy will attempt its landing maneuver over the ocean again. This should happen about seven minutes after launch, while the Starship spacecraft will cruise along the coast for almost an hour before attempting its controlled descent into the Indian Ocean.

One problem Starship faced during its fourth test flight in June, Musk said, was the loss of heat shield tiles – thousands of small, black hexagons attached to the spacecraft’s exterior that are designed to protect the vehicle from extreme temperatures during re-entry. Losing a large number of these tiles significantly affected the vehicle’s ability to attempt a soft landing, Musk said.

“Because of the lost tiles … the front flaps were so melted that it was like trying to control them with little skeletal hands,” Musk said, adding that the fourth flight was about 6 miles (9.7 kilometers) from landed in the sea away from the intended spraying point.

The company says on its website that it has conducted a “complete overhaul of its heat shield, with SpaceX engineers spending more than 12,000 hours refining the entire thermal protection system with newer generation tiles, an ablative backup layer and additional protections between the to replace valve structures.” .”

This could help Starship better survive the brutality of re-entry.

If this flight is successful, it could inspire the company to take on far more ambitious projects. SpaceX, for example, needs to figure out how to refuel a Starship spacecraft while it’s stationed in orbit. Such a maneuver will be necessary to give the giant vehicle enough fuel to travel to the moon.

If the company fails to meet its goals or causes significant damage to its launch facilities, it could raise questions about further delays to NASA’s lunar ambitions.

Artemis, NASA’s flagship human spaceflight program, aims to put astronauts on the lunar surface for the first time since the end of the Apollo program more than 50 years ago.

The federal space agency has already warned that its goal of conducting the first manned landing on the lunar surface in 2026 could be held up by Starship’s development schedule.