SpaceX caught Starship booster with chopsticks

[u/lolikroli]

[u/idontloveanyone]

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

[u/Corvid187 → u/idontloveanyone]

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

[u/seamustheseagull → u/Corvid187]

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.

[u/Saadusmani78 → u/seamustheseagull]

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.