Elon Musk announced Tuesday that SpaceX will attempt to catch both Starship and its Super Heavy booster next month, aiming to recover the entire orbital launch system for the first time. If successful, it would mark the first time in history an orbital launch vehicle has been fully recovered - a feat Musk described during the company's third quarter earnings report as "a profound technology milestone in the history of civilization consciousness." Which is a sentence that exists.

Musk, ever the optimist with a caveat, allowed for the possibility of failure. "Success is not guaranteed on these first flights, but I'd say it's more likely than not that this succeeds next flight," he said. "And if not, we have a steady stream of Starship flight attempts through the end of this year and then accelerating next year." So either way, expect more rockets, more headlines, and more opportunities to watch things explode - or not.

For the uninitiated, Starship is a two-stage system: the Super Heavy booster (first stage) and the Starship spacecraft (second stage). It stands approximately 120 meters (around 400 feet) tall with a 9-meter diameter and is powered by SpaceX's Raptor engines burning liquid methane and liquid oxygen. First introduced in 2018, Starship was designed to return to the launch site, where launch towers with mechanical "chopstick" arms catch the vehicle mid-air - because landing on a pad is apparently too pedestrian.

Last month's Starship launch notched two firsts: sending the spacecraft into Earth orbit and inserting a few dozen of SpaceX's larger and more capable V3 satellites into the Starlink constellation for the first time. But it wasn't all smooth sailing - or flying. One Raptor engine shut down prematurely during ascent, prompting mission control to adapt and complete the climb on the remaining engines. Because of the issue, SpaceX cut the planned 10-hour, 6-orbit mission short after about 3 hours and 2 Earth orbits. The Super Heavy booster splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico, while the Starship upper stage executed a de-orbit burn and ended with a fiery vertical splashdown in the Pacific Ocean north of Hawaii. Neither piece was recovered, which is precisely the problem Musk now intends to solve - with chopsticks.