Elon Musk Tweets Video of ‘Mechazilla’ Tower That Will Catch a Rocket

A daring scheme to catch a returning Starship booster rocket is taking form at SpaceX’s launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas.

The new drone footage, as shared in an Elon Musk tweet, exhibits the spectacular construction rising up from the south Texas facility often known as as Starbase. The video seems nearly a 12 months to the day after the SpaceX CEO introduced that the upcoming Super Heavy booster can be caught by a launch tower, as an alternative of creating a vertical touchdown on retractable legs.

This fowl’s eye view of the tower is forcing me to think about the sight of a 230-foot-tall (70-meter-tall) booster rocket coming in for a touchdown. It’s assured to be a visible spectacle, however it’s all a part of Musk’s plan to deploy a viable reusable heavy launch system.

In a Federal Aviation Administration filing submitted on September 10, 2021, SpaceX mentioned the 469-foot-tall (143-meter tall) launch tower, with its 10-foot-tall (3-meter-tall) lightning rod, is supposed to “lift its new rocket and booster on the launch mount, and to catch the super-heavy booster upon return from launch.” The launch and catch tower “will be constructed out of structural steel trusses to allow the mechanical arms to lift vehicles,” SpaceX added. The mechanical arms, of which there are two, will catch the descending rocket, although it’s not instantly clear how this can be completed.

Once full, the Starship system will include a Starship higher stage and a Super Heavy booster. When stacked collectively, the 2 reusable levels will create a big rocket measuring 394 ft (120 meters) in top, making it the tallest rocket ever constructed. Starship has greater than 100 metric tons of elevate capability and is designed to move crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and past.

Multiple exams of the higher stage have already been accomplished, together with a check in May 2021 throughout which a Starship prototype carried out a profitable touchdown. The decrease stage has but to be launched, however as Musk identified in a tweet from final 12 months, SpaceX is “going to try to catch the Super Heavy Booster with the launch tower arm, using the grid fins to take the load.” As an added bonus, this may allow the “immediate repositioning” of the booster onto the launch mount, such that Starship can be “ready to refly in under an hour,” Musk added.

The newly constructed launch and catch tower is at the moment going by preliminary exams, as Teslerati reports. Last week, SpaceX lifted, opened, and swung the tower’s gigantic arms, and in exams finished earlier this week, engineers lifted the meeting up the tower and closed its arms.

Musk expects the inaugural launch of a completely stacked Starship, consisting of Heavy Booster 4 and Starship prototype SN20, to occur later this month or in February. The Starship system isn’t anticipated to grow to be totally operational till 2023 on the earliest. Some time strain is concerned, as SpaceX has been contracted by NASA to offer a lunar touchdown craft within the type of a Starship rocket for the upcoming Artemis missions to the Moon, with a human touchdown anticipated no sooner than 2025.

More: The Most Exciting Things Happening in Space in 2022.