tl;dr: One of the most critical steps in development of a rapidly and completely reusable rocket just worked perfectly on its first test in the real world: midair catching of the biggest booster rocket ever back at its launch tower.

Okay, I'll start with the usual caveat that all my respect for what is happening within SpaceX is solely for the engineers and technicians and scientists doing the actual work and not for the know-nothing shithead who owns most of it. And that my excitement for the problem is solely for the scientific breakthroughs that can come from having a cheap and reusable super-heavy-lift rocket available.

The link is for a reputable spaceflight youtube channel doing commentary on the launch, as SpaceX is now required by the shithead-in-chief to only stream video on twitter/x. If you'd like a palate cleanser, the same channel presenter did a highly complimentary 94-minute in-depth documentary about the history of Soviet rocket engines. And he loves Soyuz.

The background: Starship/Super Heavy is the first attempt ever to build a rapidly and completely reusable launch system. It comes in two components: Super Heavy, the 10-metre-wide, 70-metre-tall, 33-engine booster. And Starship, the 10-metre-wide 50-metre-tall 6-engine ship that rides on top of it.

The booster and launch tower are designed for rapid turnaround, like a jetliner at an airport. Launch, return, do a systems check, refuel, and launch again within a few hours. To make this work they have to minimize the time spent moving a landed booster from its landing site to the launch tower. So why not just have the launch tower catch the returning booster mid-air? That saves all the time and equipment needed to set up the booster again. Insane, right? But this morning they proved that it works. It worked on their first try ever. This is one of the massive early R&D wins that can take years off a development schedule. Now that they know this method definitely works with this tower design, they can build more launch towers of the same design and rapidly accelerate more launch tests.

And the Starship on top also did its job. It flew most of the way around the world, testing re-entry systems before doing a soft intact splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Until it exploded afterwards, but hey, it's a prototype!

It's hard to overstate what all this can mean for space science down the road. First, a Starship variant is NASA's official lunar landing vehicle for the Artemis program. Or we could launch mass quantities of mass-produced probes and landers everywhere really cheaply, instead of one-offs every few years and having to have academic fights over where to send them and what instruments to include. We could put huge radio telescopes on the far side of the Moon where Earth's radio noise is completely blocked. We could put extrasolar-asteroid interceptors in orbit, ready to chase the ultrafast visiting interstellar rocks with massive fuel drop tanks. There's all sorts of science possibilities that open up when the cost of launch a hundred tonnes to low Earth orbit goes from several billion dollars to just several million.

(Again, see caveat at the top. I'm just in it for the science.)