SpaceX caught Starship from orbit with ‘robot chopsticks’ in a world 1st — but lost its booster in the Gulf of Mexico

"This is actually a bigger deal for humanity than most people can imagine," Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk's biographer, wrote on X after SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) caught its Starship spacecraft with the launch tower's arms on Nov. 14. Musk shared the post with a message of his own: "The epic day has arrived, thanks to the incredibly talented team at SpaceX!" Isaacson also recalled the engineers' reactions in a Starbase conference room in December 2020, when Musk pushed the idea that the tower's arms could catch a returning Starship. After about 22.5 hours and 14 orbits, Starship returned to SpaceX's Starbase site in Texas, and the tower's mechanical arms plucked it out of the air. "Mechazilla catches Starship!" SpaceX posted.