SpaceX CATCH SUPERHEAVY AFTER FLIGHT! Full Recap & the Aftermath! + Europa Clipper & HERA Launch!

SpaceX really pulled off the impossible yesterday: the madlads actually managed to do the crazy thing and CATCH the Superheavy first stage out of the sky using the giant Mechazilla robot arms on the launch tower, and then they placed it RIGHT back into the launch mount! Words cannot describe how shooketh I am - let's recap this amazing mission. The past days also saw 4 Falcon cores expended with the Europa Clipper and HERA launches, as well as a partial failure on Vulcan Centaur's second flight, saved by Blue Origin's amazing BE-4 engines. China launched a secretive high-altitude satellite, and Blue Origin aborted the launch of their brand new NS-5 rocket. All of this and so much more, enjoy!
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[@MattLowne]

Enjoy! Apologies for a minor verbal typo at 09:10 - meant to say "COPV" not "COPD" 🤦‍♂

[@Filename_37]

Hola

[@callenvlogs5989]

COPDeeznuts

[@R-BGamingUK]

Not every day do you confuse "Composite overwrapped pressure vessel" with "Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease"

[@goldgamercommenting2990]

⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠@@R-BGamingUKcomposite overwrapped pressure destruction

[@Etherus69]

My grandfather had COPD

[@Datau03]

This booster catch was just... undiscribable. What an historic event, and I we witnessed it happen live! It's incredible how amazing this is

[@PeterJCalkins]

So did I! It was INSANE

[@Hungary_0987]

But it failed right after, how can you call it a sucess?

[@Mr_Wibble]

@@Hungary_0987 I'm curious, what failed? Only thing I can think of was some burn through on the forward flaps despite beefing up the heatshield but that should be resolved with starship block 2...

[@Mrbfgray]

FAA needs to stay in it's lane, meaning GET OUT OF THE ROAD. 😄

[@RontoGoldlust]

@@Hungary_0987 No it didn't...?

[@stoplookin9484]

Flight 5 in a nutshell: how to destack S30 from B12 in 7 minutes instead of 1 hour

[@eliasdavey]

lol

[@Cleptro]

*Note: This method is intended for emergency situations only, and will result in LOS (Loss Of Starship). User discretion is advised.

[@eliasdavey]

@@Cleptro not in the future tho

[@Sundablakr]

I'm actually inclined to believe the half a centimeter accuracy from Flight 4 Booster landing, given that the Flight 5 booster could have sat itself perfectly back down on the launch mount if the chopsticks hadn't caught it, look at how absurdly accurate that giant thing was. The SpaceX software engineers are really blowing it out of the park.

[@moraleftw5745]

SO PROUD OF SPACEX WHAT AN AMAZING FLIGHT

[@donaldneill4419]

I still hadn't gotten used to watching Falcon-9 land itself - that still seems preposterous to me. The Superheavy catch looks like black magic. Absolutely magnificent engineering!

[@Zeniththedragon5]

Never thought I would hear matt talking about rollercoasters in a Space Video lol also STARSHIP BOOSTER CATCH

[@eliasdavey]

meh matt going to europa park is way more interesting tbh

[@couryswan2448]

@@eliasdavey THERE NEEDS TO BE A MOD WHERE YOU MASH UP ksp AND PLANET COASTER...

[@eliasdavey]

@@couryswan2448 omg kerbal koaster 😯

[@SebastianWellsTL]

October 13th will be a day in history that will not soon be forgotten!

[@bellion5746]

Amazing.. Finally from KSP to reality

[@StephenTSchuler]

My wife and I were watching live and I will remember the moment forever. Rockets are just a different thing now and I'm so excited for when SpaceX figures out the heat sheild.

[@parkerfindlen9823]

I woke up early to watch it, it was amazing watching the booster land

[@gooseturtle219]

Love seeing these mondays

[@EnderWahlquist]

I woke up early to see Flight 5. Afterward, I just kept thinking, "Someday kids will look up to this vehicle like I looked up to the Saturn V."

[@gdutfulkbhh7537]

Not really. Saturn V and Apollo was much more engaging. The 3rd Saturn V launch was a 'Dear Moon' type mission. Flight 5 didn't ever reach orbit, this time around.

[@Hungary_0987]

@@gdutfulkbhh7537it was literally just shy of orbit, functionally was the same

[@aliencrackgrunt]

​@@gdutfulkbhh7537still made history

[@thehobbist5544]

The fact they were able to do it sucessfully the FIRST TIME already tells me how good the rest of this program is going to go

[@KadenPlaysRBLX]

0:58 Is matt ok?

[@holographic_red]

😁

[@HarryKaemerle]

He is, just very excited :3

[@SuprSBG]

No, but none of us were when we watched that

[@燧發槍]

SpaceX’s full name makes it sound and seem like a futuristic space monopoly

[@SuprSBG]

Hmm… maybe cuz it is lol

[@zekehunter2473]

Looks like a new KSP challenge... Chopsticks Go Nom

[@PROBERevealer]

E L O N --- M U S K and his all TEAM are the men of the Century 👍🏽👍🏽🛸👍🏽👍🏽

[@thetobi583]

We went from "Is it pulling a Kerbal?!" on flight 1 to "I can't even do this in Kerbal without mods" on flight 5. What an incredible time to be alive, folks.

[@matthewturner261]

I know this video isn’t about KSP but I want to share my achievement. 4 years ago I started to play KSP on Xbox. I did a few flight tests seeing what worked for me but I never really grasped the concept of the game. I quite literally landed on the Mun completely by eyeballing it. However my engine exploded upon landing so I got 2 kerbals stuck on the Mun. Last night I decided to build a new rocket after watching several of your videos and went for a rescue mission. I successfully landed on the Mun and landed safely back on Kerbin with the poor kerbals I left to die on the Mun 4 years ago. I’m starting to get better at playing the game but I’m still just eyeballing everything and hoping it works out for the best. But I finally brought home the abandoned Kerbals after 4 years.

[@braddo7270]

This was the most mindblowing thing ive EVER seen 😍 landing it was already astonishing when they passed that milstone with the falcon launches but holy moly 🙃 how gently and perfectly it just landed there 😮 INTO MECHZILLAS ARMS 😭 poetry 👌❤️

[@dmd733]

If you look close you can see the arms sag a bit when it landed.. Crazy !

[@Sundablakr]

It was so accurate it could have sat itself right back onto it's launch mount if it wanted.

[@dmd733]

@@Sundablakr Humm... Are the chopsticks temporary ! 🤔😃

[@flameoflifecreations8959]

It was wild to watch for sure and look forward to see what else they are able to pull off!

[@RyanKingArt]

thanks for the news!

[@RolieVerSinganon-es8lr]

Catching a 400-ton object falling from 70 kilometers above earth, okay ❤❤❤❤❤

[@azimuth9819]

Hey Matt, GPS Positional operator here. My company uses GPS monitors that are accurate within 1/8" of an inch with acces to only a few satellites. Those only cost around $50k. I can only imagine what spacex has come up with. Especially considering they could have a GPS base station in the camera bouy for even greater accuracy to the Drone

[@ColeTackaberry]

Best "space this week" video yet

[@Stant123]

7:50 In addition to beefing up the thermal protection, Starship was redesigned to have the flaps mounted "higher up" (higher up when in the belly flop position, so less on the sides and a little more on the back) so that the hinging part that has now seen thermal damage twice are more protected from the heating as they're not directly in the way of the plasma stream.

[@slithery9291]

'We are go for catch' made me tingle all over.

[@derekposh]

Now that its an official historical event ! You should redo the catch in KSP 😂

[@jonbradley4789]

Another good one Matt and team!

[@Skye-Was-Taken]

Hi Matt! Long time fan, first time commenter: I still can’t believe they just caught the booster. It’s just truly NUTTY

[@clarence3654]

I met you in the Space Creators Day. Amazing day in Speyer.

[@Blatant-pidgeon2]

genuinely my jaw dropped when theh did it, i was fully expecting them to roy keane the tower

[@GreenGj-]

Twas an amazing catch

[@S1nwar]

The best thing about IFT 5 is... nothing stops IFT 6 now

[@DanTheGamerAndTrains]

I couldn't believe it when the booster was catched, such a historic day that was

[@ginstsom]

They were too busy watching starship lunch😂😂😂

[@mckrunchytoast2469]

Space X successfully parallel parked a rocket..a building sized rocket. Absolutely awesome

[@shadowryth7308]

Love you Matt!

[@foxthroat3410]

I've been watching every clip/videos I can get from the catch in an unhealth amount of times 💀

[@hadorstapa]

At a guess, as well as the buoy that filmed the super heavy landing at the virtual tower in test flight four, SpaceX would have had a number of other buoys scattered around with laser range finder equipment, so they could triangulate exactly where it splashed down in relation to the target.

[@Optimal-_-Ending]

I was so excited for flight 5 I knew they could do it.

[@STS752]

if there was asymetrical thrust on the ULA rocket, why didn't they roll to use the asymetric thrust to do the gravity turn for them? Wouldn't it have been more efficient?

[@blackmoon8459]

Gonna be honest here Matt, I didn't actually see the video of the Superheavy first stage test. So your video is where I saw it first.

[@SuprSBG]

I watched the Europa Clipper launch during my CAD class lol

[@slippymitc]

I was able to watch the Europa Clipper launch from my car while running errands today. I live in Orlando.

[@DB-zp9un]

OK, I think you're the first person that mentioned how much frost was left on the booster.. I thought "wow that's a lot of fuel left"...

[@bewilderbeestie]

One of the things I'm hoping for out of Starship is the ability to lift enough mass into orbit to allow for high-energy transfer stages. Maybe you could use the vehicle itself as a transfer stage; I don't know if it's efficient enough. That way we might be able to send probes to the outer planets and not have to wait _six goddamned years_ for the results to come in. **Edit:** Haven't checked the maths but random person on internet claims that, if refueled in orbit, it can send 100 tonnes to Jupiter via a direct injection Hohmann transfer.

[@JPEight]

The buoys that surrounded the landing area could have contained supplimentary GPS base stations, or perhaps a similar but distinct system for precision navigation, which would allow accurate tracking down to the 5cm quoted, but I am skeptical of that. 50cm I could believe.

[@dmd733]

It was .5cm, not 5cm.. which is even crazier !

[@Schinkeldink]

​@@dmd733yeah, no. I might even accept something like 20-30cm precision but .5cm is just impossible to even confirm if achieved

[@J7Handle]

@@Schinkeldink perhaps the booster got that close to what it thought was the target, but the target’s location itself was not known to such high accuracy. The tower position is possibly knowable to half a centimeter or less, so maybe if booster 4 was 0.5 cm from where it thought the target was, then that also translates to 0.5 cm accuracy for the actual catch. It certainly looked like it could’ve been 0.5 cm for booster 5.

[@Hungary_0987]

Yeah, its kind of suprising, but hey, guess they werent lying

[@AbeDillon]

3:56 GPS RTK systems can measure position within about 1-2 cm accuracy. Maybe they have a system slightly more advanced than off-the-shelf GPS RTK? Perhapse they have multiple GPS RTK systems that together reach sub-cm accuracy. It would make sense that they would use redundant systems.

[@war_fish]

they did it

[@lightningwingdragon973]

I wonder if they're gonna try and refurbish the booster, and attempt a relaunch?

[@robertdrexel2043]

Well that is one way of them trying out the whole reuse of the booster wouldn't it??

[@Hungary_0987]

Kinda doubt it, but they will certainly test it

[@gdutfulkbhh7537]

The SpaceX return for a booster catch... means they can't do a gravity turn to the east, like disposable rockets do? Might make it easier to actually reach orbit. I suppose, ultimately, you'd have a booster catch tower downrange.

[@jjthejetplane11]

I don't care what anyone else says, this was by far the most remarkable day ever when they caught that booster o7

[@fgoffeney]

I thought the booster has an option to abort to the gulf if it didn't like it's landing, which the booster would need that extra fuel. Maybe

[@SuprSBG]

If I understand correctly it’s the other way around, it defaults to gulf and if all good then they change to catch.

[@Hungary_0987]

@@SuprSBGyeah, like that

[@MichaelCoombes776]

The initial boostback burn aimed for the ocean first, then they rand the numbers to see if they could go for the catch. Numbers were good and the rest is history.

[@couryswan2448]

YOUR NEXT KSP VIDEO I BEG OF YOU PLEASE MAKE IT A SUPERHEAVY CATCH ATTEMPT!

[@landonhedin4100]

Hi Matt!

[@Blurgert]

Day 61 of asking you to play REAL SOLAR SYSTEM the KERBAL SPACE PROMGRAM 1 Mod

[@michaelbond569]

The amount of propellant leftover is probably a safety margin that will shrink with time

[@traviscecil3903]

Love the content, but...the chine damage was different than the fire. The fire started roughly at the BQD interface. The chine was near opposite side of the interface

[@sleepdeep305]

Crazy that we’re at the point that starship itself isn’t even the biggest news about SSH

[@DavidGoben]

Looks like a lot of the flap damage was actually to the shiny aluminum sheets fastened over the top of heat tiles on the flaps so engineer could easily see heat stresses on the flaps by watching aluminum change color. Also, aluminum melts at a temp where steel integrity begins to weaken.

[@g.guzmancross9722]

Wow

[@R-BGamingUK]

I am so pissed I missed the starship flight

[@Zeniththedragon5]

I missed it too :9 and the worst thing was I could have seen it I just didn't find out until it was kinda too late

[@jellybeaniac152]

10:23 I had to double check that its been 2 years, honestly crazy how the years flew by

[@WoodenPlankGames]

Nobody watching hasn't seen it? It was (Canadian) Thanksgiving, I was out in the middle of nowhere camping with family, I didn't even have cell service :P.

[@mikusikse4286]

Didn't watch yet but it's a great video.

[@edwardsummey8843]

I think flight 6 should be a repeat of flight 5, with the change that starship lands in the ocean during daylight to get better visual information of the descent. The bellyflop should give a great view of the heat tiles on the way down.

[@zhongxina9420]

if the 2nd tower is finished before that then we could see a starship tower catch

[@edwardsummey8843]

@@zhongxina9420 that should be soon, yes. However, I would like more visual data of starships condition first. I do not think they should attempt a starship catch until 2.0 is out.

[@michaeldeierhoi4096]

Tower 2 is still months away from being ready for use.

[@colegustafson199]

For the accuracy measurements, they used four bouts around the landing zone that all triangulated its position relative to themselves

[@Thefrogman081]

Great video, but why did you talk about that starship flight at 0:57, it was a pointless thing (jk it was beautiful)

[@techny3000]

11:55 because of course dream chaser's delayed again 😿 really hoping it finally gets to fly

[@ABTisforABEEGTREE]

Didymos is familiar but not because of the DART mission...

[@MicrogravityMischief]

TIM.... LOVE YOU BRO....

[@FurbieSlayer.]

Tim?

[@woodlanditguy2951]

I think they intentionally left extra fuel in the booster to both test the full extent of the catching tower and to leave extra margin for error in case they needed to abort at the last second. I think next time they will leave almost no fuel in the booster, I could be wrong but it makes sense.

[@Jtretta]

I think the levels of propellant will be near zero with a proper payload and once they feel comfortable enough with booster performance to ease off the margins. Every drop of fuel left after landing cuts into the final delta-v, so they wil want to minimize that value for payload carrying flights.

[@kaz49]

And they didn't even need to do the quicksave/quickload thing where you need to sacrifice either the booster or the rocket!

[@Harry-ff4vx]

It was amazing to see that booster get caught but is it reusable after the small fire and the structural loads it experienced during the catch if it’s not re usable after then the catch kinda means nothing unfortunately

[@CosmicAggressor]

I actually missed flight 5 because it was so much sooner than I expected and I have not really been paying attention to space in the last 2 weeks other than solar weather.

[@TheEliShow-v3w]

I commented

[@Noodle_Gaming39]

I missed it. I cant believe it

[@PET3R2]

Spacex should get a world record for catching the biggest can with the chopsticks

[@danzstuff]

Did yall also put your names on EC?

[@Jayandthegames]

1:15 remember guys bullying works. When done correctly that is.

[@flippert0]

I guess, they meant "half a meter" and not "half a centimeter". There is no navigation system (external or internal) that can provide sub-centimeter accuracy.

[@adammarsi3817]

Maybe camera pixel counting, but even if it's true it must have been also a big part luck. It has a large surface area, so a gust of wind moves it more than that.

[@SuprSBG]

XD no there’s plenty of nav systems for that accuracy, the question is if spacex could get it bc that’s usually military

[@flippert0]

@@SuprSBG Really? The only systems providing that accuracy I can think of are scientific ones (e.g. institutions that provide reference globes or monitor continental drifts of tectonic plates)

[@tombrandis]

I think that GPS has a theoretical accuracy of about 1cm so half a cm seems like it must a exaggeration

[@BabyMakR]

None has mentioned the warping of the grid fins at hot staging yet.

[@awilliams1701]

2 years ago? holy crap I thought the impact was like 6 months ago.

[@iitjeeaspirantija]

thank god starship didnt have an rapid unscheduled disassembly

[@DeadBaron]

The craziest part about this jump forward in space travel technology is that seemingly nobody cares. Outside of niche youtube videos and a few twitter posts nobody is talking about it. WTF.

[@duroph1943]

👍

[@bhargavj0shi]

10:00 sure matt the name surely sounds familiar

[@LEGACY-GAM1NG.]

Matt really 10pm really!?

[@ysglyfaeth]

not first

[@HowToSpacic]

7:00 Adrian Beil spotting

[@Makerizms]

"55 seconds ago" I was not aware that was possible

[@Yarinaviation]

Do it on ksp!!!

[@Estes-o8v]

Pls do a flight five launch and catch in ksp 2

[@therealjamespickering]

3:59 You don't have to be accurate, you only have to sound be confident in your assertions.

[@Perktube1]

0:11 - you rascals! Subverting my expectations.😅

[@misokocka2752]

Can your cats make the next video?

[@Betterthanbutter2372]

I MISSED THE STARSHIP SUPERHEAVY CATCH BECAUSE I WAS WITH MY LITTLE COUSIN im sad😥