FPI / October 18, 2024

Geostrategy-Direct

By Richard Fisher

In the early morning of Oct. 13, Elon Musk’s SpaceX Corporation achieved an amazing milestone in its quest to become the leading agent in man’s projection to the Moon and Mars.

However there are many more milestones ahead in order to secure that position.

On Oct. 13, 2024 the SpaceX corporation demonstrated the remarkable recovery of the massive — 3,675 metric tonnes at launch—Super Heavy first stage launch vehicle, a key step to realizing SpaceX ambitions to populate the Moon and Mars. / Composite of SpaceX video outtakes

Roughly 6 minutes and 56 seconds after its roughly 8 a.m. Central Time launch from the SpaceX Starship space launch vehicle (SLV) assembly and launch complex in Boca Chica, Texas, the launch tower nicknamed “Mechazilla” captured the massive — 3,675 tonnes at launch — Super Heavy first stage of the 5th launch and test mission of Starship.

Mechazilla is a 20-story, 400-foot structure that uses two “arms” to handle the Super Heavy first stage: First to assemble the two stages of the Starship on its launch pad; And then to catch the descending Super Heavy, avoiding a potentially damaging ground landing while positioning the Super Heavy for an immediate reassembly of the Starship and its next launch.

In a May 26, 2022 interview on “Everyday Astronaut,” Elon Musk explained, “This is a custom-built tower with arms that are designed to catch the largest flying and heaviest flying object ever made and pluck it outta the air. It’ll weigh about 250 tons. We’ll make that lighter over time… So you got a couple hundred tons plummeting at more than half the speed of sound. So this thing is still coming in really fast.”

The brilliance of Mechazilla is that launch, recovery and re-launch of the world’s largest spaceship can be centered in one very small location, meaning that within a relatively small space of land, hundreds of Mechazilla’s could be built to support the volume of Starship launches that Musk estimates are required to adequately project man to Mars.

In a Dec. 29, 2023 post on “X” platform owned by Musk, he said, “To achieve Mars colonization in roughly three decades, we need ship production to be 100/year, but ideally rising to 300/year.”

In 2023 Gwynne Shotwell, the SpaceX Corporation’s second in command, said that they “designed Starship to be as much like aircraft operations as we possibly can get it … We want to talk about dozens of launches a day, if not hundreds of launches a day.”

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