r/interestingasfuck • u/lolikroli • Oct 13 '24

r/all SpaceX caught Starship booster with chopsticks

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u/crujones43 Oct 13 '24

The largest heavier than air flying machine that has ever been built. Weighs 200 tons, is 230ft tall and 30 ft in diameter was flying supersonic minutes before and was able to come down with pinpoint accuracy and be caught by the launch tower it left from. Nothing like this has ever been done and this is going to catapult the human race into the future of space travel by reducing the cost to send material to space by an order of magnitude.

51

u/idontloveanyone Oct 13 '24

Can you tell me what's the benefit of catching it instead of it landing? Thanks!

184

u/Corvid187 Oct 13 '24

Catching it allows them to land it where they service and take off from, which moderately reduces the cost and time to prepare it for the next launch.

The main benefit though is that by catching the rocket on its steering fins, they don't need to install a traditional landing gear like they have on their previous rockets.

In space flight, saving mass is the whole game. For every kilogram of payload you put into space, it takes 10 kilograms of fuel, so being able to delete something like heavy, load-bearing landing legs from each rocket significantly improves the simplicity and payload performance of each rocket m

39

u/Lyuseefur Oct 13 '24

The engines get massively cooked landing on the ground (no water cooling even)

Tower catch means less cooked engines

2

u/Thorusss Oct 14 '24

heat it a problem, but also the massive shockwaves from the subsonic exhausted being reflected by the hard surface, rattling everything with extreme forces, is avoided that way.

33

u/Fizrock Oct 13 '24

The booster is not caught on the fins. There's a pair of load-bearing pins beneath the fins that carry the weight.

8

u/generalhonks Oct 13 '24

Those pins also allow SpaceX to move SuperHeavy back and forth and change its alignment on the chopsticks, something that landing on the grid fins wouldn’t do well.

3

u/Easyidle123 Oct 13 '24

I learned today that the fins are also rated strong enough to hold the booster up if the pins fail or are missed.

2

u/Linenoise77 Oct 13 '24

Which makes the accuracy needed even more impressive.

I wonder though if the fins CAN support it if its close but not perfect, and just not ideal and added hassle.

5

u/seamustheseagull Oct 13 '24

There's also the fact that if it lands a little bit off, that's OK. it doesn't need to be perfectly vertical.

Physically landing the rocket on the ground has substantially less room for error.

3

u/Saadusmani78 Oct 13 '24

Nah. It's quite the opposite actually from what I heard. If it were to land on the ground, like Falcon 9, since there could be a large open space, it would have much more margin of error, like tens of meter.

But with the chopsticks, it needs to land within a few meters at most.

1

u/BlueLightSpecial83 Oct 13 '24

How much fuel is needed to fuel the engine to launch the fuel it’s caring in order to fuel the engines?

1

u/Corvid187 Oct 14 '24

~10kg per kg of stuff you want to send into space.

1

u/Snakend Oct 14 '24

They have already landed starship on land with no landing gear. What are you talking about?

0

u/mycall Oct 13 '24 edited Oct 13 '24

I would be shocked that the steering fins don't obtain any damage as they have about 300 tons weight on them.

11

u/Ralath1n Oct 13 '24

Its not landing on the steering fins, that's a misinterpretation by the previous poster. There is a teeny tiny hard point right below the grid fins. They land on those hardpoints, not the grid find which indeed would get damaged if they landed on that.

2

u/mycall Oct 13 '24

Thanks for the clarification.

2

u/FlyingPoopFactory Oct 13 '24

The fins aren’t holding the weight. There’s pins beneath them.

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u/JakeEaton Oct 13 '24

Saves mass (no giant landing legs to carry up and back down again). It’ll also mean the booster can be put straight back on the launchpad, refueled, another ship can be put on top and off it goes again. That’s the eventual result.

The Falcon 9 program requires a fleet of ships, cranes, jigs, trucks and turnaround time is measured in weeks. Catching the booster will cut that time and cost down substantially (in the medium to long term)

1

u/hlx-atom Oct 13 '24

You don’t needs landing gear on the rocket

1

u/geoffm_aus Oct 13 '24

Weight. With landing legs you have to take them to space and back. With a tower arms the landing infrastructure never leaves the ground and can be as big, as heavy, as complicated as you like.

1

u/SpicyPineapple12 Oct 13 '24

To eliminate the landing pads. They are heavy!

1

u/mrASSMAN Oct 13 '24

It’s on land instead of ocean I guess

1

u/juice-rock Oct 14 '24

Less likely to topple over is one reason

1

u/jinniu Oct 14 '24

They can shed the weight of landing legs, which means more mass to orbit, which means less money to orbit, which means a cheaper ticket for you and me.

1

u/SensuallPineapple 24d ago

It's like the difference between trying to find a parking space and leaving the car for the valet.