Last week SpaceX on October 13th  had successfully caught the starship booster. This is a major achievement because the booster on the rocket was only used on the first part of the mission and these boosters can be reused but many cannot be catched and fall into the ocean and have to be salvaged then later on can be reused. 

In catching the booster SpaceX needed to keep a few things in mind, they had to think about whether or not the booster would come back to its original spot where the rocket had taken off from. The process of catching this booster wouldn’t be easy. They had the Mechazilla, which is  the large catching structure. This is being referred to as the “chopsticks” The chopsticks were meant to be designed as arms out to be able to catch the booster. Another thing they had to think about was how hot the exhaust was going to be since when a rocket’s come down from space in the ocean their exhaust is extremely hot estimated to be around 5800°F. Due to this extreme heat it can burn the ground and can actually melt the concrete that’s on the ground, it can also damage the legs of the rocket booster because of how heavy it is and it can cause the rocket to damage the whole entire rocket and it would be more of a cost to repair it. 

To make this possible SpaceX had to do multiple experiments to finally be able to capture the booster. During the trials, the rockets would explode while in the air and Elon Musk had said in an interview that it was weird for the rocket to not explode in the air while trying to catch the booster. The starship booster had taken 5 attempts to successfully catch the rocket booster.