The 469-foot (about 143-meter) tall launch and capture tower is being tested at SpaceX's Texas launch facility.
SpaceX's launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas, is mulling a bold plan that will capture a returning Starship booster rocket.
Recently, Elon Musk shared a new drone footage on Twitter showing the impressive building rising from a facility known as Starbase in Southern Texas. The video comes nearly a year after SpaceX CEO announced that the upcoming super-heavy booster would be caught by the tower, rather than landing vertically with retractable legs.
From a bird's-eye view, we can't help but guess that a 230-foot-tall (70-meter-high) booster rocket is about to land. It's certainly a visual spectacle, but it's all part of Musk's plan to deploy a viable, reusable heavy launch system.
In a Federal Aviation Administration filing filed Sept. 10, 2021, SpaceX said the 469-foot-tall (143-meter-tall) tower and its 10-foot-tall (3-meter-tall) lightning rod were designed to "lift its new rocket and booster on the launcher and catch the super-heavy booster on the launch return." SpaceX added that the launch and capture tower "will be built from structural steel trusses to allow robotic arms to lift the spacecraft." The robotic arm has two that will grab the descending rocket, but it's unclear how this will be done.
Once completed, the starship system will include a starship superior and a super heavy booster. When they are stacked together, two reusable segments will create a huge rocket at an altitude of 394 feet (120 meters), making it the tallest rocket ever built. With a lifting capacity of more than 100 tons, Starship is designed to transport crew and cargo to Earth's orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond.
Several tests of the starship's superiors have been completed, including one in May 2021. During this time, a prototype of a starship successfully landed. The subordinate has yet to launch, but as Musk noted in a tweet last year, SpaceX "will try to grab the super heavy booster with the launch tower arm and use the grid fin to withstand the load." Musk added that as an added bonus, it would allow the booster to be "immediately repositioned" to the launcher so that Starship would be "ready to fly again in an hour."
The newly built launch and capture tower is reportedly currently undergoing preliminary tests. Last week, SpaceX hoisted, opened and swung the tower's huge arms. In tests conducted earlier this week, engineers hoisted the component and closed its robotic arm.
Musk expects the first launch of a fully stacked Starship consisting of heavy booster 4 and prototype SN20 to take place later this month or in February. It is expected that the starship system will not be fully operational until 2023 at the earliest. With SpaceX signing a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to provide a lunar lander in the form of a starship rocket for the upcoming Artemis lunar mission, a human landing is not expected to be earlier than 2025.
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