SpaceX Successfully Recovers Its Most Powerful Rocket

By Kristóf Somogyi, 2028

Published 12/7/2024

For decades, space exploration organizations seemed to agree that once a rocket ship was put into space, there was no getting it back down safely. After entering the upper atmosphere, spacecrafts’ boosters (the part of the rocket that initiated liftoff) would detach and crash into the ocean. Rockets were never designed to be reusable.

However, in the ‘90s and 2000s, some space agencies started developing ways of recovering space vehicles by catching the boosters before they hit the ground. In 2016, SpaceX sought to significantly advance this developing technique with the construction of Starship, which was intended to be the largest and most powerful rocket to ever take flight. Furthermore, Starship’s booster was designed to be fully reusable. On October 16, 2024, the company prepared to test its recovery system in real life (albeit unmanned) for the first time. Many were nervous about what the result would be, as SpaceX has experienced over ten incidents in which ships had crashed or exploded. Nonetheless, this Starship operation proved to be a massive success: the rocket booster was captured by the recovery tower’s rotating “chopsticks” exactly the way SpaceX strategists intended. NASA director Bill Nelson congratulated SpaceX on their success later that day.

Starship’s historic accomplishment could be the beginning of a new era of spaceflight. If organizations like SpaceX and NASA continue to save money and resources by reusing their rocket boosters, the sky’s the limit for what these increasingly efficient spacecraft can achieve.