Liftoff: What it's like attending a Starship launch
Thursday, as you know, saw the fourth Starship launch, and the first in which both the Starship and the Super Heavy booster both made it all the way to a successful splashdown. I've never actually seen a launch of any sort before – I tried once at Kennedy Space Center, but it was scrubbed three days in a row and I simply couldn't continue to postpone going home any longer. It ended up being scrubbed for weeks, so I made the right call to head home.
I drove down toward Boca Chica with high expectations. Given my prowess with a camera, I just knew I was going to basically go home with a Pulitzer for "2024's most amazing photo of the year" in the can.
In humanity's short history of space flight, Starship is the biggest spaceship ever attempted. It will be capable of carrying over 220,000 pounds (over 100,000 kg) of stuff into space. Crew, cargo, and everything one would need to survive long-term in space and even colonize other planets.
As with SpaceX's other highly innovative launch vehicles, it's made to be reusable. Not like rockets of the past, which were ditched into decaying orbits to burn up in our atmosphere or simply fell from high altitude back to Earth, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars as well as vital components and materials. SpaceX can catch both the booster and the ship itself and use them again for future missions. At some point, they might be able to re-launch them repeatedly within just a few hours.
