SpaceX Caught a Falling Rocket Booster With Giant Mechanical Arms

Landing a rocket upright on legs, as Falcon 9 does, was already considered one of the hardest tricks in aerospace. SpaceX’s Starship program attempted something even stranger: catching a returning booster out of the sky with a giant pair of mechanical arms.

The Super Heavy booster — the massive first stage of the Starship system, itself about 71 metres tall — doesn’t land on its own legs at all in this configuration. Instead, it descends back toward the launch tower it lifted off from, and two enormous arms mounted on that tower, nicknamed “chopsticks,” close around the booster near its top and catch it in mid-air, just above the ground.

The reasoning behind such an audacious approach: landing legs add weight and complexity that has to be carried all the way to orbit and back on every single flight. By making the launch tower do the catching instead, the booster itself can be lighter, and — if it works reliably — the booster can theoretically be made ready to refly faster, with the tower doing double duty as both launch mount and landing cradle.

The first successful catch, achieved in 2024, required the booster to hit an extremely precise position and velocity on its final descent — millimeters and milliseconds of margin on a machine the height of a 20-story building, falling from the edge of space.

It’s a maneuver with no real precedent in rocketry: not a landing so much as a mid-air handoff between a falling rocket and a stationary structure built specifically to grab it. Whether it becomes as routine as Falcon 9’s leg landings remains to be seen — but the fact that it has worked at all marks one of the more startling engineering feats in the history of spaceflight.