SpaceX rocket booster makes successful landing after test launch – as it is caught by ‘chopsticks’
A SpaceX booster rocket has returned to earth and been caught by giant robotic arms – following a successful launch of the company’s Starship spacecraft.
It was the first attempt to bring the rocket’s 232-foot (71 metre) Super Heavy booster back to the launch tower by re-igniting three of its 33 Raptor engines to slow its speedy descent.
After separating from the Starship at a height of 46 miles (74km), it returned to Boca Chica in Texas, seven minutes after launch, where it was grabbed and clamped in place using what are described as “chopsticks”.
Arguably, they look more like metal arms, or giant pincers.
The catching of the booster was not guaranteed to go ahead. Both it and the launch tower had to be in good, stable conditions, SpaceX said.
But it settled into position in what appeared to be a calm, controlled manner.
The Super Heavy on its way back down. Pic: AP
The booster rocket clamped back in place by the ‘chopsticks’. Pic: SpaceX
SpaceX tweeted that “Mechazilla” had caught the “Super Heavy booster!”
“Are you kidding me?” SpaceX’s Dan Huot said close to the launch site. “I am shaking right now.”
“This is a day for the engineering history books,” added SpaceX’s Kate Tice.
SpaceX owner Elon Musk said on X, which he also owns: “The tower has caught the rocket!!”
Space journalist Kate Arkless Gray said the booster was still travelling at a supersonic speed less than a minute before landing.
“The deceleration involved in that is wild,” she told Sky News.
She added: “SpaceX have really, really innovated. Even just a few years ago, the idea of bringing a booster back to land or a barge in the sea – no one was doing that.”
It’s the Starship’s fifth test flight. Pic: AP
The Starship, meanwhile, landed in the Indian Ocean, west of Australia, following its fifth test flight from a launch pad on the border with Mexico.
“Splashdown confirmed!”, SpaceX said on social media.
Starship and Super Heavy are designed to carry crew and cargo to the moon and beyond – and be reusable.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approved the launch only yesterday, weeks earlier than expected.
Previously, the FAA said a decision on Starship 5 was not expected until late November.
But it said Elon Musk’s company had “met all safety, environmental and other licensing requirements for the suborbital test flight”.
It has also approved the Starship 6 mission profile.
The Starship lifted off from Boca Chica in Texas. Pic: AP
Musk has heavily criticised the FAA – partly over the delay in approving the licence for Starship 5, which SpaceX said was ready in August.
SpaceX describes Starship as the world’s “most powerful launch vehicle ever developed”, capable of carrying up to 150 metric tonnes.
First unveiled in 2017, it has exploded several times in various stages of testing.
In June, it successfully completed a full flight for the first time.
Donald Trump has signed an executive order to open a migrant detention centre at Guantanamo Bay.
Speaking before making the act official, Mr Trump said that thousands of migrants who cannot be deported to their home countries will be held at the complex, on the island of Cuba.
“I’m also signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay,” he said.
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“Most people don’t even know about it. We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.
“Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them, because we don’t want them coming back.”
It comes as Mr Trump’s controversial pick for health secretary – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – faced a hearing committee where he was grilled on his views, including on vaccines and abortion.
At its peak, about 680 people were held at the American-run prison in Cuba. File pic: AP
Guantanamo Bay was set up in 2002 by then president George W. Bush to hold detainees in the wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror.
Only 15 prisoners – including Ramzi bin al Shibh, accused of being a 9/11 co-conspirator – remain at the detention centre.
At its peak, about 680 people, most suspected of terrorism and being “illegal enemy combatants”, were held at the American-run prison in Cuba.
The facility has been criticised by human rights groups and legal campaigners over potential breaches of international laws and conditions.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel deemed the decision as “an act of brutality” in a message on his X account, and he described the base as one “located in illegally occupied Cuba territory”.
In response to Mr Trump’s announcement, former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci – who briefly served under the previous Trump administration – said: “Also known as a concentration camp.
“Yet no dissent. No courageous political leader willing to stand up to this.”
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RFK Jr faces Senate hearing
Earlier on Wednesday, Mr Kennedy – the president’s pick to be health secretary – faced a grilling over his views on vaccines, abortion and Medicaid at a Senate confirmation hearing.
Appearing at the Capitol, Democratic senators raised some of the 71-year-old’s previous remarks comparing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to Nazi death camps, linking school shootings to antidepressants, and his claim that “no vaccine is safe and effective”.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr was grilled on vaccines, abortion and Medicaid at his confirmation hearing. Pic: AP
One senator, Sheldon Whitehouse, told Mr Kennedy “frankly, you frighten people” when discussing an outbreak of measles in Rhode Island – its first since 2013.
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The nominee said he did “not have a broad proposal for dismantling” Medicaid – a state and federal taxpayer-funded healthcare programme – and dismissed claims he was anti-vaccine by saying his children were vaccinated.
Mr Kennedy – the son of Robert F Kennedy and nephew of former US president John F Kennedy – was also questioned on his previous support for abortion and was shown statements as recent as from when he was running for president as an independent.
He said he now agrees with the president that “every abortion is a tragedy”.
Federal funding pause memo rescinded
It also comes after Mr Trump’s budget office rescinded an order freezing spending on federal grants – less than two days after it sparked legal challenges across the US.
The order on Monday sparked uncertainty over a financial lifeline for states, schools and organisations that rely on trillions of dollars from Washington.
However, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Sky’s US partner network NBC that the freeze itself has not been withdrawn and that it was simply a cancellation of the memo ordering it.
Lord Mandelson says calling Donald Trump a “danger to the world” in 2019 was “ill-judged and wrong”.
The former Labour minister has been named as the next UK ambassador to the US, although there have been questions about whether President Trump will accept him.
Speaking to Fox News, Lord Mandelson walked back his criticisms from the president’s first term in office.
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The 71-year-old told the conservative-backing US TV channel: “I consider my remarks about President Trump as ill-judged and wrong.
“I think times and attitudes towards the president have changed since then.
“I think people have been impressed, not just by the extraordinary second mandate that he has received from the American people, but the dynamism and energy with which he approached not just the campaign but government as well.”
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Many Labour figures, including the now Foreign Secretary David Lammy, criticised Mr Trump before, during and after his first term in the White House.
Now they are in government and Mr Trump is back in power in Washington DC, language has become more diplomatic.
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Trump aide calls Mandelson a ‘moron’
Lord Mandelson told the Alain Elkann Interviews podcast previously: “What Donald Trump represents and believes is an anathema to mainstream British opinion.”
He added: “Even those who have a sneaking admiration for Donald Trump because of his personality, nonetheless regard him as reckless, and a danger to the world.”
The likely new ambassador criticised Mr Trump’s attitude to a previous holder of that office, and said the president was “little short of a white nationalist and a racist”.
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Speaking now, Lord Mandelson praised Mr Trump, saying he was a “nice” and “fair-minded person” who could become “one of the most consequential American presidents I have known in my adult life”.
He added: “I think that with the approach he is taking to government, which frankly just seems to us in Britain so much more organised, it’s so much more coherent, he seems to be so much more clear in what he wants to do, we take encouragement from that, that gives us greater confidence.”
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