Even if you think Elon Musk is a nut, this was pretty cool . . .
SpaceX used its giant "CHOPSTICKS" idea to catch a rocket yesterday morning. There's footage of it from multiple angles.
The rocket took off and landed at their launch facility in South Texas. It's the first time they've tried to catch the booster in midair, and they nailed it.
The giant "chopsticks" . . . or big metal arms . . . are attached to the launch tower. Catching it in midair makes it easier to reuse the booster, so they can do back-to-back flights.
The entire rocket is around 400 feet tall, and the bottom part they caught is 232 feet of that. So it's slow and expensive to move something that big from a landing pad back to a separate launchpad again.
The upper stage of the rocket flew for about an hour and made a "soft landing" in the Indian Ocean.
SpaceX says the chopstick idea is an essential part of building a Moon base, and landing humans on Mars. Elon called it "science fiction without the fiction," and a "big step towards making life multiplanetary."
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