Just launching Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever to fly, seems like a major achievement. To return its booster, as high as a 20-floor building, delicately to the launch tower and catch it using giant metal arms almost defies belief. Yet this is what Elon Musk’s SpaceX achieved this week, on only Starship’s fifth uncrewed test flight. Proving a reusable megarocket is workable opens a new era in space transport, and in the commercialisation of space. Musk is a capricious and contentious figure. Yet the description of the SpaceX founder by Britain’s astronomer royal — as a “21st-century Isambard Kingdom Brunel”, the visionary engineer of the Industrial Revolution — may not be entirely wide of the mark.
單憑發射星艦這個有史以來最大、最強的火箭本身，似乎就是一項重大成就。何況還將其高達20層樓的助推器精確地返回到發射塔并使用巨大的金屬臂接住，幾乎令人難以置信。然而，這正是埃隆?馬斯克(Elon Musk)的SpaceX在星艦僅進行了第五次無人試飛時取得的成就。其證明巨型火箭可以做到重復使用，這開啟了太空運輸和太空商業化的新時代。馬斯克是一個反復無常且充滿爭議的人物。然而，英國皇家天文學家對SpaceX創始人的描述是，作為“21世紀的伊桑巴德?金德姆?布魯內爾(Isambard Kingdom Brunel)”，工業革命時期有遠見的工程師或許并不完全離譜”。