The Fall of the Century

On Sunday morning, shortly after 7:25 a.m. Boca Chica, Texas, time, the world looked up to watch the fall of the century. Barreling back to Earth after pushing a 40-story spacecraft through the skies, the Super Heavy booster plummeted back to Texas, igniting its 33 engines to slow its descent to the ground.

Its target was a massive metal landing tower that, in theory, could catch the booster with two “chopstick” arms in a snug embrace, ensuring it could go up and, yes, down again one day. The task wasn’t thought possible years ago for a booster this large. But as it fell to Earth Sunday, engineers on the ground made the historic catch.

Elon Musk once called Starship a battle between theory and reality, and when simulations and reality don’t agree, “reality wins.”

On Sunday morning, they agreed.

It is impossible to overstate what happened on the shores of Texas, or what’s happened for two decades in El Segundo, the little industrial town south of Los Angeles where SpaceX was born. In its infancy, the country was reeling from horror. Only months before SpaceX’s inception in March 2002, terrorists had flown commercial jets into two crown jewels of New York City engineering, murdering thousands.