Mechazilla: SpaceX’s monster catches the Starship in mid-air
T-shirt with Mechazilla catching the Super Heavy. © Captntom.com
Historic catch-up of the Super Heavy S30 booster by Mechazilla, October 14, 2024. © SpaceX video, Gif made on ezgif.com
Mechazilla, a portmanteau made up of mecha and Godzilla, has become the new darling of space engineering by grabbing in its soft metal arms the S30 booster, the first stage of the Starship, the largest rocket in space history. Mechazilla, therefore, or the birth of a star on October 14, 2024.
In 2020, SpaceX announced through the voice of its iconic (and controversial) boss Elon Musk that he was going to catch up with this booster via the launch tower itself. However, in 2020, the Starship had never flown. It only existed in several prototype pieces, as well as in the minds of the company's engineers and their boss.
Three years later, the largest launcher in the history of the conquest of space – whose initial code name was BFR for Big F*** Rocket, yes yes… – rises sluggishly into the sky of April 2023 Many claim, wrongly, that this first test was a failure, because 5 of the 33 Raptor engines did not ignite. Furthermore, the Starship does not take off straight and its explosion is triggered without having successfully separated the two stages.
During the first test (IFT-1), 5 of the 33 Raptors in the first stage engine bay malfunctioned. The thrust is weak, the Starship struggles to take off… © SpaceX
18 months later, fifth test… Takeoff is nominal (it was from IFT-2) and… you all saw what happened. You don't need to be a great space expert to understand that this is beyond imagination. Improbable!
The Super Heavy goes from 5000 km/h to around 3 km/h in 240 s
In a few seconds, the immense first stage, 71 m high, 9 m in diameter and weighing more than 200 t (there is still fuel to restart the engines during the controlled descent) goes from 5,000 km/h to 70 km of altitude during separation (said hot staging) at around 3 km/h to fit into a 145 m tower, aka Mechazilla, from where he took off 7 minutes earlier. On the first try. Yes, FROM… THE FIRST… SHOT!
Even Elon Musk must have been surprised, he who tweeted before the launch: “Excitement guaranteed. Possible success.” Of course, experts didn't really expect complete success. The return of the second stage, the Starship itself, the one which must make the journey to the Moon during the Artemis missionslanding there and taking off again to return to Earth, was a little more complicated. Let us keep in mind that this machine crosses 100 km of atmosphere “like a rocket”, with the constraints of pressure and heat that this entails, then carried out a suborbital flight (up to 212 km of altitude) to descend into the air heated by friction, becoming a magnificent plasma.
The tiles and fins heated up a little too much, but Ship 30 landed vertically, probably a few meters from its nominal target before exploding in the Indian Ocean.
Plasma leaves no stone unturned. © SpaceX
They say what they do and do what they say
The craziest thing about SpaceX is its great strength, and that the company progresses like no other between each test. Its engineers have crazy ideas from a technical point of view, which they implement whatever the cost (and undoubtedly there is cause for criticism).
The Artemis program, which requires in-orbit refueling and regular Starship takeoffs, has just returned to fruition, despite its delays. It becomes more and more credible, and behind the Moon, there is Mars.
Behind the Moon, Mars waits… © Gif produced on ezgif.com from a video by an amateur astronomer
Of course, the constraints are not the same, and getting humans to walk on the Red Planet is a different story. We know how to do robots, but humans don’t yet. But as we wrote in the article announcing the IFT-5 trialbetting against SpaceX is a risk that we advise our readers against.
