Elon Musk’s Starship rocket has completed a world first after part of it was captured on its return to the launch pad.

The SpaceX vehicle’s lower half manoeuvred back beside its launch tower where it was caught in a giant pair of mechanical arms, as part of its fifth test flight.

It brings SpaceX’s ambition of developing a fully reusable and rapidly deployable rocket a big step closer.

“A day for the history books,” engineers at SpaceX declared as the booster landed safely.

The chances of the bottom part of the rocket, known as the Super Heavy booster, being caught so cleanly on the first attempt seemed slim.

Prior to the launch, the SpaceX team said it would not be surprised if the booster was instead directed to land in the Gulf of Mexico.

SpaceX can now point to some extraordinary achievements in the past two test flights. This comes only eighteen months after its inaugural flight, which saw the vehicle blown apart not long after launch.

SpaceX argues that these failures are also part of its development plan – to launch early in the expectation of failure so that it can collect as much data as possible and develop its systems quicker than its rivals.

The initial stages of the ascent of the fifth test were the same as the previous outing, with the Ship and booster separating two and three-quarter minutes after leaving the ground.

At this point the booster began to head back towards the launch site at Boca Chica in Texas.

With just two minutes to go till landing it was still not clear if the attempt would be made, as final checks were carried out by the team operating the tower.

When the flight director gave the go-ahead, cheers went up from SpaceX employees at mission control.

The company had said that thousands of criteria had to be met for the attempt to be made.

As the Super Heavy booster re-entered the atmosphere as its raptor engines worked to slow it down from speeds in excess of a few thousands miles per hour.

When it approached the landing tower, which stands 146m-high (480ft), it seemed to almost float, orange flames engulfed the booster and it deftly slotted into the giant mechanical arms.

The Ship part of the rocket, which is where equipment and crew will eventually be held for future missions, fired up its own engines after separating from the booster.

It was successfully landed in the Indian Ocean around forty minutes later.

“Ship landed precisely on target! Second of the two objectives achieved”, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on X.

Not only was the Ship landed accurately but SpaceX also managed to preserve some of the vehicle’s hardware, which it had not expected.

(BBC News)

During the Carboniferous Period, Earth’s atmospheric oxygen levels surged, helping some plants and animals grow to gigantic proportions. One notable example was Arthropleura, the biggest bug ever known at up to 10-1/2 feet (3.2 meters) long, inhabiting what is now North America and Europe.While its fossils have been known since 1854, a large gap has existed in the understanding of this creature because none of the remains had a well-preserved head. The discovery in France of two Arthropleura fossils with intact heads has now remedied this, providing the anatomical details needed for scientists to classify it as a huge primitive millipede and determine it was not a predator but rather a plant eater.

The fossils, unearthed in Montceau-les-Mines, are of juvenile individuals, dating to about 305 million years ago. At the time, this locale was near the equator, with a tropical climate and a swampy environment lush with vegetation. While Arthropleura was this ecosystem’s behemoth, the fossils preserve young individuals just 1-1/2 inches (4 cm) long.The fossils showed Arthropleura’s head was roughly circular, with slender antennae, stalked eyes and mandibles – jaws – fixed under it. Arthropleura had two sets of feeding appendages, the first short and round, and the second elongated and leg-like.

The specimens each had 24 body segments and 44 pairs of legs – 88 legs in total. Based on its mouthparts and a body built for slow locomotion, the researchers concluded Arthropleura was a detritivore like modern millipedes, feeding on decaying plants, rather than a predator like centipedes.It could have served the same role in its ecosystem as elephants today or big dinosaurs like the long-necked sauropods in the past – “a big animal spending most of his time eating,” said paleontologist Mickaël Lhéritier of the Laboratory of Geology of Lyon at Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 in France, lead author of the study published this week in the journal Science Advances, opens new tab.

“I think it is quite a majestic animal. I think its gigantism gives it a peculiar aura, like the aura of whales or elephants,” Lhéritier said. “I love to imagine it as the ‘cow’ of the Carboniferous, eating during most of the day – but, of course, a cow with an exoskeleton and many more legs.”

Arthropleura was the largest-known land arthropod, a group spanning the likes of insects, spiders, millipedes, centipedes, lobsters and crabs.

(Reuters)

Hurricane Milton has made landfall in Florida, bringing tornadoes, floods, and the risk of storm surges.
More than two million homes and businesses are without power, and there have been “a number of deaths” reported on the Atlantic coast.

In St Petersburg, on the west coast of the state, the roof of a Major League Baseball stadium was torn off.

Milton was a category five hurricane – it has been downgraded to category one, but is still wreaking havoc.

Milton comes two weeks after Hurricane Helene killed at least 225 people in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina.