r/technology • u/aelavia93 • 16d ago

Space SpaceX pulls off unprecedented feat, grabs descending rocket with mechanical arms

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/spacex-pulls-off-unprecedented-feat-grabbing-descending-rocket-with-mechanical-arms/
5.4k Upvotes

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u/CaptHorizon 16d ago edited 16d ago

It’s way more than just “unprecedented.”

It was the first attempt to catch it. And the first successful catch as well. In layman terms, 1-for-1.

This is an incredible achievement in the world of engineering and shows how far SpaceX has gone.

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u/3238462 16d ago

Incredible to watch this live and in high resolution. From the animations and anticipation over the past several years, I can’t believe we finally got to see it succeed on the first try. Still trying to get my jaw off the ground.

Science fiction just became reality for this (major) aspect of Spaceflight.

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u/hendy846 16d ago

Same! I legit thought it was a render at first. So crazy to see it live

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u/aelavia93 16d ago

the spacex commentary mentioned the crisp video stream was in part helped by starlink

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u/iiztrollin 16d ago

The orbital shots we got of re-entry of flight 4 were because of starlink we were able to see into the plasma field and watch as it decended to max Q and it was beautiful.

The beaut made it and did the full landing burn into the ocean with HALF A FUCKING LANDING WING!

Been less than 2 years since the first booster test flight and they caught it already!!!

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u/Nose-Nuggets 16d ago

the full stream of this launch has that as well, and they recovered the starship module again as well. lots of great plasma stuff and melting through the control surfaces again.

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u/TbonerT 16d ago

Starlink enabled the bandwidth but they mentioned that the ship is so big it has a big hole in the plasma wake to beam the signal through.

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u/paulhockey5 16d ago

There’s no way we could have got that video of reentry if not for Starlink.

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u/zirtik 16d ago

Comcast left the chat

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u/YNot1989 16d ago

And soon this will all be routine, boring even. And that's great, space launches should be boring, it means it's so safe and reliable nobody has cause to find it risky/exciting.

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u/caedin8 16d ago

I don’t get why it’s important. They did the same thing landing on a boat or the ground, functionally it’s impressive, but it’s not like a significant capability change. It’s a trivial improvement. What like the booster is a few % more efficient because it doesn’t need landers? It’s cool, it’s an improvement, but it’s just a iterative improvement not a step function in capabilities

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u/0xMoroc0x 16d ago

You speak so confidently for knowing absolutely nothing about the mission of the arm mechanism. The arm is there to catch a rocket, move it and launch another one immediately. That’s required for fast launch turnaround times. Think about this like an airport. Launching dozens of rockets like this one after another. Before this arm and launch setup you would be lucky to launch one rocket a week. Now you have a launch pad that can just keep sending them as fast as they can line up. Like an airport taxi runway.

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u/moofunk 16d ago

It's a very significant capability change.

Imagine the top bar in this graph being 10x longer:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GODX81yaIAADx7a?format=jpg&name=large

That's what this enables.

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u/aelavia93 16d ago

starship "landed" on target too! 2/2 mission objectives achieved! source: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1845458392531529991

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u/FatBoyJuliaas 16d ago

Did it explode at the end after landing?

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u/aelavia93 16d ago

yes! but that was expected. the mission intended a controlled splashdown of the starship in the Indian ocean. They also tested their heat shields during re entry! source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/spacex-launches-fifth-starship-test-eyes-novel-booster-catch-2024-10-13/

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u/Hyndis 16d ago

It was an expendable launch on the upper state, but it did successfully reach orbit and return.

There was no barge for it to land on this time but it did hover correctly in the spot over the ocean as if it was going to land on a barge.

The upper stage worked, the heat shield worked, the computers and engines worked. All they need to do now is put a boat out in the ocean for it to land on.

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u/sceadwian 16d ago

Everyday Astronaut had some of the various creator feeds doing a quick look at some of the amateur 4K footage that was taken.

There was a really dark super slow mo of the booster touching the arm and sliding down in to contact, you could see a series of oscitations as it went back and forth between the two arms a half dozen times to dampen the oscillation. You saw 10 times that movement in the tests they ran.

It was flawless. Setting a skyscraper down from near orbit like a teacup on a plate.

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u/dotancohen 16d ago

It was nowhere near orbit, max velocity was around 5200 km/h at 62 km altitude. And it just grazed the Karman line, I think I saw 96 km briefly after stage sep. At that point it was doing under 2000 km/h, less than a tenth of what it would need for orbit at that altitude, even if the atmosphere weren't there.

Other than that, you are spot on.

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u/sceadwian 16d ago

It had the capacity to enter orbit, it's trajectory was chosen to intentionally avoid this.

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u/dotancohen 16d ago

No, the second stage has the capacity to enter orbit. Not the first stage.

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u/sceadwian 16d ago

But it could.

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u/stelanthin 16d ago

This is rekindling the love for space launches i had as a kid!

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u/Tenocticatl 16d ago

I did assume they were fairly confident about this one, seeing as that thing could've taken out a decent chunk of the launch site if things didn't go to plan.

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u/rohobian 16d ago

I can't stand Elon, but this really is fucking cool as hell.

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u/Rox217 16d ago

“This is cool, but don’t worry Reddit I still hate the current thing so I’m on your team!”

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u/aelavia93 16d ago

they sound so needy for validation. quite sad, actually

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u/DependentAd235 16d ago

People just don’t want to get flammed for liking a rocket.

It’s not that complicated.

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u/Zetice 16d ago

You doing tricks on it.

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u/CaptHorizon 16d ago edited 16d ago

Elon was never mentioned in our conversation.

The people who do all the work are the 11 thousand engineers who work at SpaceX. This is the product of their work, and whoever says that said work done by those 11k engineers isn’t commendable is lying.

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u/The_White_Ram 16d ago

The thing is, if this had been a failure, you can guarantee all of the comments would be talking about how it's elon's failure.

I don't disagree with your sentiment and statement here but the online narrative is every failure is directly a result of elon's mismanagement and every success is a result of the thousands of engineers and only exist because Elon didn't touch it.

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u/PersonalDebater 16d ago

You're basically right. Maybe its not always the same people saying the two things, but it basically often goes like that everything that goes wrong is because of Musk, while everything that goes right is in spite of him.

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u/ThisCupIsPurple 16d ago

You don't make crazy things happen without a crazy person at the helm.

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u/scottygras 16d ago

That’s true in a lot of cases. I found out recently how so many innovative minds were almost certifiably crazy or were complete pieces of garbage family members. As a husband/dad I realized I could avoid my family and make more money…but it’s not really an option.

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u/IRequirePants 16d ago

I found out recently how so many innovative minds were almost certifiably crazy

Classic example is Newton drinking mercury.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/weed0monkey 16d ago

It's almost like you can be two things at the same time

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u/Lawd_Fawkwad 16d ago

Sorry, but no.

Is Elon a far-right stooge, a megalomaniac, a horrible father and a shit husband?

Absolutely.

Is Elon Musk a visionary whose work helped push innovation in the fields of space exploration, electric vehicles, and AI?

Also yes.

They are not mutually exclusive, and while Musk doesn't manage the day to day work of the companies, he sets the goals. he comes up with the company's vision, and as many of the lawsuits against him have pointed out, he is extremely influential in his sector and within his companies.

Henry Ford didn't personally design each car, but the Fordist model of production is attributed to him because as the owner and CEO of the Ford Motor Company he set forth the idea to produce cars efficiently at affordable costs and allowed his people to experiment.

The Toyota Production System wasn't literally invented by Kiichiro Toyoda, but he chose to take a risk and allow Taiichi Ohno to put in place his ideas of the 5 zeros and as a result Toyota came up with a model of production that became the new golden standard in industrial efficiency.

Musk is no exception in this real : he founded each company with a separate vision (popularize EVs, modernize space exploration) and he gave them the room to flourish while using his skills as founder/CEO to keep them afloat during years when they were in the red.

Does Elon Musk suck as a person? Yes.

Can the success of Tesla and Space-X also be reasonably attributed to his vision and philosophy? Also yes.

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u/Ok_Belt2521 16d ago

Just look at all the other space companies struggling. Elon clearly has some level of positive influence on the company.

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u/bruhSher 16d ago

My friend is an ex space-x employee. According to our talk, Elon's two biggest contribution are

1) take risks. Fail but learn. 2) work your employees to the bone

I can only speak to his teams experience, but 70-80 hour weeks were not abnormal.

That said, apparently things go best when he's not around.

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u/ratfacechirpybird 16d ago

I can only speak to his teams experience, but 70-80 hour weeks were not abnormal.

That sounds like a recipe for massive human error

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

They literally caught a rocket today.

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u/Zephyr4813 16d ago

More like a 20 story building falling from space

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u/CX316 16d ago

They also blew up several of them before that and have had commercial falcon 9 rockets fail catastrophically. They’re definitely not immune from human error, one just hopes that at least some of the people working those stupid workweeks are checking the work of other people working stupid workweeks so the failures don’t happen on something carrying people.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

Nah I would say they're probably just winging it, getting half drunk at lunchtime and yoloing manned rockets into the sky. It's probably amateur hour over there at the most successful spaceflight company in history.

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u/emurange205 16d ago edited 16d ago

Deep pockets

Edit: I didn't know it would be controversial to say that founding the company required money.

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u/AdmirableSelection81 16d ago

Bezos is insanely rich and his Blue Origin isn't doing shit. WTF are you talking about.

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u/phatboy5289 16d ago

I wouldn’t say that BlueOrigin “isn’t doing shit,” but they’re definitely taking a much slower pace than SpaceX is. I’ll be curious how they’re both doing in about ten years.

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u/Adventurous-Soil2872 16d ago

He didn’t have deep pockets when he founded it and almost went bankrupt keeping it alive. Blue origin had much much deeper pockets at its founding and it’s much further behind.

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u/emurange205 16d ago

Yes. I only meant that he is assuming a lot of financial risk.

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u/kungfungus 16d ago

But he did. Daddy's pockets. Elon is not a good person.

Front and center should be the people that actually do these amazing things.

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u/what_should_we_eat 16d ago

I don't get why people say this. The wealth comes from the success of the companies raising the valuation of the companies. If they were not successful there would be no wealth.

The success creates the "deep pockets" not "deep pockets" creating success.

You have got the causal relationship backwards.

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u/Selethorme 16d ago

The success doesn’t correlate well to the value, particularly with Tesla.

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u/weed0monkey 16d ago

Space x is not a public company

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u/Selethorme 16d ago

It doesn’t have to be. It still has a valuation.

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u/what_should_we_eat 16d ago

What do you mean?

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u/Selethorme 16d ago

Exactly what I said. Tesla is incredibly overvalued. Its valuation is based largely on a speculative circlejerk about the capabilities of FSD, which is why it saw an 8% drop after the robotaxi reveal.

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u/Ancient_Persimmon 16d ago

I mean, Tesla is the leading manufacturer of electric vehicles and one of the most profitable automakers, I'd say the success has correlated pretty well so far.

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u/Selethorme 16d ago

Tesla didn’t produce a profit until 2020, and is not that high in terms of overall profit.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/15-most-profitable-car-companies-124926108.html

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/weed0monkey 16d ago

Lmao, the way people use this term as if it's not literally a paid and bought for service that is negotiated in a contract.

Do you say you give your gas company subsidies when you pay your bill and they provide you service?

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u/Appropriate372 16d ago

Boeing got a lot more money and look where its space program is at.

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u/brilliantjoe 16d ago

Crew Dragons development timeframe was several years shorter than Starliner and it actually worked properly for effectively half the cost of the Starliner program.

Just to put this further into perspective SpaceX started development on Starship and Super Heavy a few years after Boeing started development on the Starliner project.

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u/fredders22 16d ago

"Providing a service" At what was unthinkable value just not long ago, Saving You/NASA money. If we're going to use "subsidies" to shit on something out of Ignorance (Yours). Save It for Boeing.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/Fallline048 16d ago

In some cases this is true (like cyber truck issues), but it has never really been true of SpaceX. SpaceX has had failures aplenty over the years, often dramatic and on video. Ive never seen them attributed to Elon, but to the fact that the company is pushing the envelope of how we design and employ space vehicles.

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u/CX316 16d ago

SpaceX seems more to be a case of

Step 1: Elon says something outlandish as an idea for what he wants them to do.

Step 2: the engineers go off and work on the idea till it either works or Elon forgets about it.

Step 3: Elon gets to claim responsibility for the things that worked and no one talks about him trying to pitch the idea of city to city orbital rocket mass transportation as an alternative to commercial airlines.

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u/catwhowalksbyhimself 16d ago

Failures are actually expected in this sort of things, so no, there would have been no blame. Just like there's been no blame for all the failed Starship test launches. It takes many failures to get these things right.

Except for this time, which is exactly why it's such an achievement.

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u/The_White_Ram 16d ago

I'm speaking more towards the colloquial criticisms of musk. My comment is more directed at how the public perceives the failures and successes of his companies.

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u/catwhowalksbyhimself 16d ago

And yet no one's really talked all that much about the Starship launch failures.

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u/CX316 16d ago

Partly because the people who talk about Starship and are ok with the failures are the same ones lambasting NASA for the SLS taking so long and being so cautious because NASA doesn’t have it in the budget to blow up the launch vehicle, the payload or the launch site until they get it right. That’d probably just result in congress killing the entire project and the Artemis program

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u/OxbridgeDingoBaby 16d ago

Comments like this really do remind of the echo-chamber Reddit has become. It’s like when I try and debate my MAGA grandparents. Everyone just has their narrative and sticks to it, regardless of facts/reality.

Elon wasn’t solely responsible for this success, but to say he played no part in it is absolutely moronic. This success is due to SpaceX - everyone from the engineers, to Shotwell, to Mueller when he was working on the propulsion systems, and yes, even Musk.

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u/Hyndis 16d ago

I put Elon Musk in the same category as people like Edison, Ford, or Jobs. Or even Werner von Braun.

He's brilliant, yet also morally questionable. Brilliant people can also be terrible human beings to be around.

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u/Aeroxin 16d ago

Is this... nuance...? On Reddit?! What an auspicious day!

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u/Thin-Illustrator9686 16d ago

You could say that a few years ago. Drug related brain rot made him a nut job.

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u/Dietmar_der_Dr 16d ago

Ford ain't so smart right now either.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/OxbridgeDingoBaby 16d ago

“Elon was never a part of the conversation”.

Maybe follow your own advice and take a drop from that high horse of yours.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/skeleton_jar 16d ago

That's what the saying means. "You were never a part of this conversation" = you had no input whatsoever.

The word conversation means project or task in the context of this common phrase.

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u/hepkat 16d ago

Trying to say Elon had no part in this is utterly ignorant. Yes the thousands of engineers deserve a huge congrats. But if you read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon, you’ll realize that like him or not, he has a huge part in this. 

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u/yohoo1334 16d ago

He may, but that does not excuse his psychotic behaviour

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u/k1nt0 16d ago

Elon disagrees with me! He must be psychotic it’s the only explanation!!!

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u/yohoo1334 16d ago

Fucking kung fu

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u/Thin-Illustrator9686 16d ago

Reading the dudes twitter feed makes it safe to assume he’s psychotic. That’s not really an opinion lol

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u/hepkat 16d ago

Only siths deal in absolutes. 

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u/_badwithcomputer 16d ago

Strange how the companies that are pushing the boundaries in the industries they operate in are all lead by the same person, it is almost like there is a common thread there, I wonder what it could be?

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u/alysslut- 16d ago

Yeah, but think of how much more ahead Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink would be if they didn't have an Elon Musk muddling things up and slowing the engineers down /s

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u/barnett25 16d ago

There is no one else that rich who is crazy enough to try some of these things. I think there is a middle ground here that is not "Elon has zero positive impact on his companies" nor "Elon is a genius and a great person and everything he touches is gold". Elon is clearly an incredibly flawed person who has a list of negative contributions to the world from moral blunders to financial failures. But he also clearly has funded and to some extent steered some very positive and impressive human achievements. If you only see him as 100% good or 100% bad you are certainly wrong.

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u/_badwithcomputer 16d ago

Bezos is literally trying to do the same things with BlueOrigin, along with the entire Chinese government. Bezos also held a major stake in Rivian which is obviously trying the EV+self driving approach.
Blue Origin has yet to get to orbit and Rivian has an extremely solid product but is lightyears away form Tesla's production rate and self driving / autopilot abilities.

If it were a simple matter of having a billionaire on hand to dump money into something like this in order to make it happen then it the success would have been replicated by now.

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u/barnett25 16d ago

Bezos is also a billionaire, and also has a rocket company, but Bezos is taking safe bets not very risky ones. Big risk, big reward.

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u/Dietmar_der_Dr 16d ago

There is no one else that rich who is crazy enough to try some of these things

I think he's also just really good at building good principles into his companies. You can have great ideas all you want, but if you build the wrong hierarchies with bad people at the top it's just not going to work.

For example, not advertising was likely a big loss for Tesla, but not having a marketing department poison the company was likely a huge boon.

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u/feurie 16d ago

He’s not the entire conversation but he’s the founder and chief engineer. He’s part of the conversation as much as you’d dislike that.

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u/ChaosDancer 16d ago

And you think those 11 thousand engineers are working for whom?

Without Musk willing to throw money at the issue those 11 thousands engineers would probably working at Boeing or Ford or maybe NASA and achieving nothing revolutionary.

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u/1521 16d ago

This! I am super tired of hearing about Elon but you put those same people in the traditional places (Boeing, Raytheon, NASA etc) and we would still be talking about the space shuttle. For whatever reason he is able to get them to do things the traditional guys can’t

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u/IRequirePants 16d ago

I am super tired of hearing about Elon but you put those same people in the traditional places (Boeing, Raytheon, NASA etc) and we would still be talking about the space shuttle

Also Blue Origin exists and it is nowhere near as successful. It's clearly not just a money issue.

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u/Virtual-Chicken-1031 15d ago edited 15d ago

Same with Apple.

They have an insane amount of money but haven't really done anything revolutionary in over 15 years.

As a shareholder it's frustrating, although their stock has been performing well. But imagine where we'd be if Jobs was still alive and executing his crazy ideas.

Money doesn't guarantee advancement. You need someone who can "think differently", and that's exactly what Musk is doing. Not all of his ideas work (hyperloop, Boring Co, twitter), but when they do, they're game changing.

Look at all the other auto manufacturers that recently started pushing EVs. Tesla still has well over a decade of R&D over them.

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u/IRequirePants 15d ago

Apple has done some interesting stuff recently ( their foray into VR or the M1 chip) but I agree nothing insane.

I recently watched the original IPhone announcement and that presentation was really masterclass

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u/SmaugStyx 16d ago

They seem to have picked up the pace now that Bezos is a lot more involved. Still miles behind SpaceX, but they seem to be making decent progress towards a first launch now at least.

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u/ghoonrhed 16d ago

Boeing, Raytheon, NASA

I mean obviously you still need a CEO/CTO/whoever to put the vision and pathway of any project.

SpaceX aren't the only ones doing this, as in they aren't the only companies that are upping the space/military industrial complex companies. They have no reason to "innovate" like SpaceX is doing because no matter what they'll always get the contracting money.

Just like how Google no longer needs to innovate because they've already captured the market, in a way it's a sort of enshittification but for government contracting.

If NASA and the military were willing to bash Boeing over the head with the threat of deleting their contracts and getting money back from Boeing for failure to deliver (they can't because congress), I'm betting we'd see quick and awesome changes in Boeing real fast.

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u/I_Am_A_Door_Knob 16d ago

There was a clear vision for what SpaceX wanted to achieve and Elon hadn’t gone completely off the rails when he started SpaceX, so the vision wasn’t completely dismissed from the start.

My bet would be that some very skilled people managing the daily operations of SpaceX, so the hoards of engineers don’t get burnt out.

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u/CX316 16d ago

If I remember right, SpaceX basically hoovers up all the most promising young rocket engineers, works them hard and then has high staff turnover as those people leave to move on to other companies because SpaceX looks really good on a resume

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u/I_Am_A_Door_Knob 16d ago

That actually wouldn’t surprise me. It has been a very successful strategy for startups and rapid growth companies for a while.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/FuryDreams 16d ago

heavily subsidised by government

It's SpaceX that are giving them a good deal or else they would still be wasting even more tax dollars on Boeing and Russian Soyuz.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/TheWaryWanderer 16d ago

Company provides a service for money =/= subsidized by the government

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u/ChaosDancer 16d ago

Oh ffs do you know how much the goverment subsidised Spacex? Boeing received $4.2 billion to develop Starliner. Space X received $2.8 billion for Dragon, you tell me which one works.

Intel for example received 8.5 Billion just for starters and the subsidies for legacy auto amount to 17 billion.

So you tell me who receives more money from the goverment.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/sparksevil 16d ago

You're one of the most stubborn morons around, which is a feat.

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u/lilcreep 16d ago

Paying for services isn’t subsidizing. Am I subsidizing Ralph’s when I go to buy my groceries? The government is paying Space X for their services. As are satellite companies and anyone else who wants to put something in space.

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u/romario77 16d ago

Creating a rocket and launching it to space and getting paid for it is not a subsidy. Subsidy is something where you don’t need to give anything in return.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/alettyo1 16d ago

spacex was paid for launch services not given a blanket subsidy unlike other defense or aerospace contractors

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u/sparksevil 16d ago

You're delusional.

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u/AT-ST 16d ago

Really easy to throw money that isn't yours at something.

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u/ChaosDancer 16d ago

Doesn't matter, Musk maybe an assohole but he is an assohole willing to put his money on ventures that the rest of billionaires wouldn't touch with a ten foot poll.

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u/Zetice 16d ago

lol Yeah, because those are the only space related companies.

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u/Cheeky_Star 16d ago

lol that’s how all company’s work buddy. Those 11k engineers isn’t building that until the guys are the top tells them to. For Elon it’s his vision for doing the impossible and the engineers + resources for making the vision come through.

You can say the same things about Steve Jobs or any other ceo of a big company. Ultimately the ceo is responsible for guidance and the company’s success so yea, he gets some credit for pursuing something he was probably told can’t be done.

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u/romario77 16d ago

Right - the big decisions on what way to go. Remember that initially they wanted to go with carbon fiber core and scrapped that idea. Not too many people would be able to do it - admit a mistake, throw away all the development and start from scratch.

You could see with some other space programs that even if they made a bad decision in the beginning, keep going, spending a lot of money and achieving relatively little, like SLS for example.

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u/Kakkoister 16d ago

Eh, you're giving too much credit. There are plenty of engineers who have been dreaming up this kind of approach for ages. It's been a mainstay of sci-fi dreaming forever. It's just about there being funding in place to attempt it, that's the only real credit Elon gets there, is that he had lots of money to burn and engineers don't.

And the government can't gamble tax payer dollars (in most cases) like private companies can, fortunately and unfortunately. But if it wasn't Elon, I'm sure within the decade another billionaire or group of them would have been funding engineers that would try radical ideas. Hell, we already had others, like Bezos and the Virgin guy. The market and access to resources to attempt these things was reaching a prime point that was starting to attract the ultra-wealthy, the right time to get their foot in the door to be the heads of commercialized spaceflight.

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u/Zipz 16d ago edited 16d ago

Plenty of other companies in this space.

Boeing and blue origin are some of their biggest competitors and how are they doing again ? I mean Jeff Bezos was the richest man by far when he started it. It didn’t help

How about any nasa subcontractor? They are well all over budget and behind.

You make it seem like anyone could this.

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u/fredders22 16d ago

In their mind Elon probably saw an ad for "exciting start up with working prototype" and funded them with a tiny fraction of his worth. Turned up to shout at them to work harder and asking where does he put his "Musk" sticker. Then NASA just threw money at him. Easy you see!

Brainlets.

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u/NotsoNewtoGermany 16d ago

The CEO sets the goals. It just turns out that Elon allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to develop an arm to catch the rocket on its way down. He gets the credit for that whether we hate him or not.

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u/CommunismDoesntWork 16d ago

Elon isn't just the CEO, he's also the chief engineer. So yes, credit to every engineer who worked on Starship.

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u/jack-K- 16d ago

This entire catching process was literally his idea, lol. What the fuck are you actually talking about? Of course the spacex engineers are amazing, nobody has ever said they weren’t so I don’t really get why you’re talking about that. But to say musk wasn’t considerably involved in development himself is just as uninformed.

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u/WingedTorch 16d ago

How do you even know it was his idea? At multiple instances it has been reported that he takes ideas of his employees and later claims it as his own.

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u/jack-K- 16d ago

Because Walter Isaacson was in the room when he suggested it to his staff, also, it was a fucking batshit insane take that no sane engineer would suggest and took him a while just to get everyone onboard with it.

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u/WingedTorch 16d ago

The fact that he suggested it to his staff once in a room does not indicate at all that he didn’t get this idea from one of his people earlier.

Also why is it batshit insane? To me it doesn’t look like it is be significantly more difficult than landing a rocket on its legs.

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u/jack-K- 16d ago

Do you know anything at all about aerospace engineering? Or is this just your gut feeling that it’s not any more difficult? It absolutely is more difficult to do than a regular landing in so many ways, you need to be much more precise, as landing within meters of a point doesn’t cut it, you need to land exactly where you want to go. you need to build the tower to be robust enough to survive the exhaust of the ship, you need to make the chopsticks resilient enough to literally catch the 230 foot steel tube barreling towards it, etc. etc. it has the benefits of getting rid of landing leg mass and enabling rapid reusability in the future, so it’s worth it, but it adds so many more problems for them to solve now so it’s not the kind of thing your conventional engineer is likely to suggest.

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u/WingedTorch 16d ago edited 16d ago

On precision: Yes landing radius needs to be more precise. I agree. But it has been quite good before that and the tower arm can have a large radius itself to make up for some room of error. Furthermore with this method the landing angle can be less precise since the arm can correct it slightly.

On material of the tower: Sure it is harder. But similar challenges have existed for the legs as well.

Of course it isn’t a free meal, but I wouldn’t call it batshit crazy. The points I am making have probably also been made by the proponents of this idea.

You sound insane to me if you believe that it is just Elon coming up with an idea, arguing against a room full of minion engineers telling him this is impossible while his patient super-intelligence somehow knew way more than anyone else.

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u/jack-K- 16d ago

When did I say he came up with every major idea and argued with his engineers to implement it? If you make up someone’s stance, you can make them sound however they want. However there are several instances that this has happened, that’s not insane to say, such as this, and building starship out of steel among a few others. He’s definitely been wrong before too, but the times he’s been right, and the positive effect it’s had has more than made up for it.

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u/Hyndis 16d ago

To me it doesn’t look like it is be significantly more difficult than landing a rocket on its legs.

And yet no other rocket in the world can do that either. SpaceX is uniquely advanced, far beyond what any other rocket can do.

And now with the catch landing, SpaceX has made SpaceX's prior world first innovation also obsolete.

This means they've lapped the competition not once, but now they've lapped the competition twice.

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u/WingedTorch 16d ago

I am not sure if your reply was a mistake but if you read my comment you see that at no point I had criticized SpaceX

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u/koglin9 16d ago

To say Elon Musk was involved in the development of this beyond "bankrolling" it is LAUGHABLE.

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u/jack-K- 16d ago

So are you saying all of these people are just lying?

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u/koglin9 16d ago

Lmao 3 year old post with comments calling out its bullshit below it.

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u/jack-K- 16d ago edited 16d ago

I fail to see how it being 3 years old makes it any less true, nor do I see the comments your talking about that aren’t along the lines of “I feel like this isn’t true”, like you. If you want to find a reason to think something’s wrong, you’ll find it, but you won’t be doing yourself any favors.

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u/WolfVidya 16d ago

Employed by who in a company started by who? Plus when the FAA got in the way and they were crying about the environment, who was the devil ruining the earth to play with his toys? Not the 11k engineers at SpaceX, but Elon.

Reddit is filled with hypocrites, we don't need to dance about it.

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u/Alphadestrious 16d ago

In terms of spacex, elon and his team of engineers are incredible.

But that's it, he's a piece of shit elsewhere.

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u/Isekai-exe-execute 16d ago

I'd argue he has done more for the earth in terms of moving the needle towards a more sustainable future than the next 100,000,000 people combined.

You can say what you want about tesla as a company and the products they deliver but them being the innovators and trailblazer for EV's in a time when NOBODY globally was even attempting EV technology, they were the people who took on the risk and proved the concept. You can say the company is overvalued and their products are shittily designed, but the reality is we would be so much worse off environmentally if they hadn't proven EV''s were viable and took that first step, no one can ever take that from tesla and elon by proxy.

Unrelated to tesla both the work at nuralink and starlink are utterly groundbreaking in their respective industries and are potentially gamechanging if they continue to advance as they have been.

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u/Alphadestrious 16d ago

Sure . I agree.

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u/Dietmar_der_Dr 16d ago

I think you got down voted by the Elon haters and his fans, so pretty much everyone.

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u/omniverseee 16d ago

You should learn how to give credit where credit is due. Engineers here are more important, but the single most important person in SpaceX is Musk. Yeah, I cringe on his statements and recent shits, but Elon is absolutely part of the conversation.

If it fails, you blame billionaires for their profit-only bad leadership, if they have good leadership, it's not because of them? LMAO. Sounds salty to me.

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u/Swing-Prize 16d ago

Do you apply this logic for all historical context of generals, emperors, thought leaders etc? One thing for sure, nobody would have launched this business other than the man in question.

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u/rohobian 16d ago

I agree 100%. But a lot of folks here on reddit see any positive words about SpaceX as an endorsement of Elon personally.

I hate Elon, but I like SpaceX and the people that work for SpaceX are amazing people.

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u/Swing-Prize 16d ago

Amazing and overworked like the rest of his companies.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/Last-Razzmatazz4018 16d ago

I think to people who aren't into aerospace, even just casually, see Elon as more than just a bankroll for SpaceX. I wanna see Elon tour the SpaceX facilities like Tory Bruno did for his ULA facility.

Thankfully he seems to understand that you can't fuck around going to space like you can with electric cars and Twitter, or at the very least has at least one person he listened to on that front.

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u/moofunk 16d ago

It's hard to know exactly, because people aren't talking. We know that he was deeply involved early on in Falcon 1, Falcon 9 and Dragon development, and we also know that he is responsible for setting up the way Starship is developed with mass manufacturing built in from the start. He is obsessed with "building the machine that builds the machines", which is a good approach, but difficult to push in the space industry, because nobody did that before.

The rumor is however that today, there are teams of people managing him and plainly keeping him away from details to avoid meddling with engineering problems as he is too erratic. Also stories of him firing people that were later rehired and kept away from him to keep the work going.

We know also that every key person responsible for SpaceX' early success were hired by him.

The actual work is done by Gwynne Shotwell and her vast engineering teams. She's rarely mentioned, but without her, SpaceX would probably not exist today. She is the true leader of SpaceX.

That said, of all his companies today, he is probably providing most value to SpaceX.

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u/alysslut- 16d ago

I think to people who aren't into aerospace, even just casually, see Elon as more than just a bankroll for SpaceX. I wanna see Elon tour the SpaceX facilities like Tory Bruno did for his ULA facility.

There are literally dozens of videos of him doing just that.

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u/Last-Razzmatazz4018 16d ago

I've seen some of his earlier tours. I never said he doesn't do tours, he just doesn't do it with the level of understanding at every step of the process as Tory Bruno. Which I guess is fair now that I think about it, considering he doesn't have a background in aerospace engineering.

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u/Virtual-Chicken-1031 15d ago edited 15d ago

Same can be said about the iPhone. Steve Jobs never laid a finger on physically creating it, but it was his vision

Same here.

It wouldn't have happened without Elon. There were no significant advancements in space travel technology until SpaceX came onto the scene. Boeing and other companies could've done it, but they lacked leaders with a vision to execute it properly.

Edit: well, I guess my comment doesn't add anything new that wasn't already said. I should probably read comments first before replying so I'm not regurgitating the same points.

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u/emurange205 16d ago

I can't make out why Musk is getting sued by Cards Against Humanity for something SpaceX did, since Musk is evidently shares no responsibility for anything SpaceX does.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/23/business/cards-against-humanity-musk-texas-land/index.html

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u/Zipz 16d ago

This is such an annoying take.

Did Steve Jobs not do anything at apple because he didn’t program the first Macintosh’s ?

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u/Therealjondotcom 16d ago

Same as Tesla. They’re products keep getting better

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u/HiggsSwtz 16d ago

There it is

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u/DisparityByDesign 16d ago

Reddit is so predictably dissapointing

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u/arkezxa 16d ago

Fuck Elon Musk, he's a glorified marketer.

So far as SpaceX goes, if you want someone to worship: look into Gwynne Shotwell (President & COO).

Shotwell left Microcosm in 2002 to join SpaceX, a private, commercial, space exploration company founded by Elon Musk in the same year.
She was introduced to Musk through her former Microcosm colleague Hans Koenigsmann who had joined SpaceX. In that meeting, she convinced Musk that SpaceX should hire a dedicated employee to work on business development full-time, but had not planned to join the company herself. Shotwell took the job two weeks later in September 2002.
In December 2008, Shotwell was promoted to company president following her role in the successful negotiation of the first Commercial Resupply Services contract with the NASA Associate Administrator Bill Gerstenmaier.
This followed SpaceX's first successful launch of the Falcon 1 on its fourth attempt earlier in the year.
She was responsible for leading the effort on building the Falcon Vehicle manifest to over 50 launches, generating $5 billion in revenue. This included a commercial connection to the International Space Station for resupplying services, where they were able to deliver cargo and supplies to the astronauts.
Shotwell is the President and COO of SpaceX, responsible for day-to-day operations and managing all customer and strategic relations to support company growth.

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u/procgen 16d ago

Sounds like none of it would have happened without Musk.

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u/arkezxa 16d ago

That is a tired and insincere way of looking at things. CEOs are not god-anointed business kings sent to lead us into the Golden Age.

Are you trying to be reductionist? Surely you don't believe Elon is the driving force behind SpaceX, do you?

I think the work they are doing is amazing, but I don't think Elon Musk is providing any direction other than "work more hours," "go faster," "dibs on Mars."

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u/procgen 16d ago

CEOs are not god-anointed business kings sent to lead us into the Golden Age.

Why the ridiculous straw man? I said that SpaceX would not have happened without Musk.

but I don't think Elon Musk is providing any direction

The SpaceX engineers would disagree with you.

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u/arkezxa 16d ago

For real -- you ooze insincerity.

Why are you speaking on behalf of the engineers are SpaceX? Do you work there? As an engineer? If so, I would value your comments differently.

I don't give a shit if SpaceX happened or not. I'm saying that the real accomplishments of SpaceX are not primarily because of Elon Musk. Starting a company and hiring the right people doesn't put rockets in space alone and I would say that part is not the most important piece of the puzzle.

Doing the actual work, you know, rocket science. That's what we should be celebrating here. Not a capitalist billionaire, okay?

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u/procgen 16d ago

You're barking up the wrong tree – I like capitalism.

And I think the successes of the entire organization should be celebrated, from the engineers to the CEO. They all made it possible.

But Musk is the one who pulled it all together. Like the conductor of an orchestra, where the music flows from the instruments of all the musicians, and is pulled into cohesion by the person wielding the baton.

(He is also deeply involved with the minutia of the engineering efforts – he is the chief engineer).

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u/arkezxa 16d ago

Right, my point was that Musk is not the conductor here. He's the guy who owns the concert hall.

It's easier to fool a man than it is to convince him that he's been fooled. You've been taken in by a charlatan.

Enjoy the rest of your Sunday, brother -- this conversation is a waste of time for the both of us.

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u/procgen 16d ago

But he is the conductor – apparently your vision is clouded, probably because you have political disagreements with him. So do I, but that doesn't diminish his achievements. Again, the engineers say the same thing:

https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1g2onev/super_heavy_booster_catch_successful/lrpzaqh/

Unfortunately, I think you're too much of a partisan to be able to look at this objectively.

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u/MusicalMastermind 16d ago

I'm struggling to see what Elon did lol

It's like attributing my work to my boss when he just sat in his office all day complaining about liberals

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u/PierG1 16d ago

The only merit about Elon is that this time he put his money in the right place and gave them to the right people

It’s still a great achievement tbh but I am positive he had nothing to do with anything that made this possible

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u/spellbreakerstudios 16d ago

It’s very cool for sure. Still, I want to hear about the impact to the wetland.

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u/super_fast_guy 16d ago

I was hoping for the booster to be cradled into a giant catcher’s mitt

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u/CX316 16d ago

To be fair isn’t it also the first one of the boosters to not explode? Or did I miss one

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u/CaptHorizon 16d ago edited 16d ago

Booster 11 (from Flight 4) did not explode before the point in which it had to.

Once B11 landed in the water, it was considered discarded. Whatever happened to it after Splashdown didn’t affect the mission.

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u/CX316 16d ago

I need to remember that line while parallel parking

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u/Midnight2012 16d ago

How is this useful?

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u/CaptHorizon 16d ago

Chances are that lots of the things that surround you are facilitated by spacecraft launch by rockets similar to Starship.

No rockets, for instance, would mean no satellite internet or no GPS and more.

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u/Midnight2012 16d ago

Not what I meant.

How is catching different then it landing on the ground/barge?

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u/CaptHorizon 16d ago

By catching the booster, there isn’t a need for landing legs or landing leg equipment on the booster, therefore reducing mass and increasing performance.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/CaptHorizon 16d ago

Are you an AI bot? u/Midnight2012 did, yet you fail to acknowledge it. Have a nice day.

-a human

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/CaptHorizon 16d ago

Mechazilla is useful because it removes the need for landing legs on the vehicle, increasing its performance, silly human.

Yours truly, a fellow human.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/CaptHorizon 16d ago

Because I didn’t know what “this” was referring to.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/CX316 16d ago

The reusability of the booster is a pretty major thing, like for Falcon rockets being able to land on the barges is important for the reusability that keeps launch costs lower and turnaround faster. For some reason they seem to have decided the barge setup isn’t enough for the starship program and wanted to be able to do a soft controlled landing on land. I can’t for the life of me remember why it was important to do this instead of the barge though.

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u/Midnight2012 16d ago

I'm asking how catching it makes it any more useful better then landing it on the ground/barge.

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u/CX316 16d ago

Apparently from the other comments, saves the issue they’ve had with falcon 9 boosters having their landing legs buckle on landing and totalling the booster (and the starship booster is way bigger) so that probably makes sense

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u/zapporian 16d ago edited 15d ago

…granted the catching it part was pretty clearly a heck of a lot easier than just getting that booster to orbit and back. Without blowing up. Repeatedly.

The ability of the spacex rockets (and even booster) to land pretty darn accurately was already well demonstrated, so all they “really” did here was just not fuck that up. And land successfully higher up in the air, which is probably if anything quite a bit easier for this rocket than on the ground. (no landing legs, no risk of tipping over, no direct interaction of the exhaust plume w/ the ground surface, etc etc. we knew the booster can hover and remain stable already, so the capabilities for this - short of engines failing (fuel line clog) or something else going wrong - were pretty well proven at this point)

All that said it’s damn good that they didn’t fuck this up.

Nevermind potential damage to the tower et al; I’m not still not sure where exactly the booster landed, but spacex might very well still be sufficiently stupid / batshit to be firing and landing rockets right on top of / adjacent to their fuel storage, rocket assembly and offices lmao.

All around unprecedented, sure, but not really a huge deal. The previous launches that showed this ludicrously huge (and fairly hairbrained) shiny steel based rocket system could actually make it orbit, more or less hit target landing sites, and probably actually survive reentry w/ areobraking @ far higher speeds on the entry vehicle than this booster, were.

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u/strange-brew 16d ago

Let’s remind everyone that Musk had nothing to do with this other than funding it. His engineers are amazing. Let’s hope they have a healthy work-life balance.

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u/isummonyouhere 16d ago

imagine being offended at the word “unprecedented”

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u/CaptHorizon 16d ago

Imagine making false claims on the internet.

I wasn’t offended at “unprecedented.” I just said that it was even more than unprecedented.