Rocket Catching Tower: Where ABB Robots Fit

On 13 October 2024 a Super Heavy booster flew back to the tower that had launched it, slowed almost to a hover and was caught by two arms on the tower. A rocket catching tower makes the launch pad the landing site too, so a booster can be inspected and flown again without a long trip back. This post covers how rockets were stacked and serviced before, how recovery went from parachutes to landing legs to tower arms, what SpaceX plans for November, and where ABB robots, which already plug in electric ferries and scan hot engine parts, could fit as launch sites speed up.

The Starbase launch tower closes its chopstick arms around Super Heavy Booster 12 on Starship Flight 5, 13 October 2024. Photo: Steve Jurvetson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

How rockets were stacked by crane and serviced by swing arms

For Apollo, NASA built its rockets standing up. The Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center, completed in 1966, is 526 feet (160.3 m) tall and was designed to stack large ready-made stages vertically onto mobile launcher platforms. It has five overhead cranes, two of them rated for up to 325 tons, and 136 other lifting devices. Once a Saturn V was assembled and tested, a crawler-transporter drove in, picked up the mobile launcher with the rocket standing on it and carried the stack to the pad.

Looking down on the Apollo 12 Saturn V as it is stacked inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, 28 May 1969. Photo: NASA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Each Apollo mobile launcher carried a 380-foot Launch Umbilical Tower with nine swing arms. They let crews service the Saturn V on the pad and swung away from it at launch. A hammerhead crane sat on top of the tower; on the third launcher it went in on 1 March 1965. When NASA rebuilt the launchers for the Shuttle, the tower from that third launcher was taken apart and partly reassembled at Launch Complex 39A as the pad's Fixed Service Structure. SpaceX has since built its Florida Starship tower, catching arms included, on the same pad.

The Saturn V 500F test vehicle rolls out of the Vehicle Assembly Building on its mobile launcher with the Launch Umbilical Tower, 25 May 1966. Photo: NASA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Getting rockets back took much longer. In the early 1960s, Corona reconnaissance satellites dropped film capsules under parachutes, and US Air Force crews in modified C-119 Flying Boxcars, replaced in 1961 by JC-130B Hercules, snagged them in mid-air with a loop of nylon rope fitted with brass hooks. Boosters were thrown away until 21 December 2015, when a Falcon 9 first stage launched from Cape Canaveral with 11 Orbcomm satellites came back and landed upright at Landing Zone 1, near the launch site. No first stage of an orbital rocket had done that before. SpaceX has landed boosters on legs more than 600 times since.

The Falcon 9 first stage standing on Landing Zone 1 after launching 11 Orbcomm satellites in December 2015, the first landing of an orbital booster. Photo: SpaceX / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Chopsticks at Starbase and Cape Canaveral this autumn

For Starship, SpaceX dropped the legs and gave the job to the tower. On Flight 5 the Starbase tower, nicknamed Mechazilla, closed its "chopstick" arms around Booster 12 just under seven minutes after launch. Space.com counts three booster catches in 14 test flights. On 20 October, on an earnings call, Elon Musk said Flight 15, planned for November at Starbase in Texas, will try to catch both the booster and the Ship upper stage. "If we succeed, it will be the first time that an orbital launch vehicle has been fully recovered," he said. The Ship travels higher, farther and faster than the booster, which makes it harder to catch.

Booster 12 descends beside the Starbase tower moments before the first catch on 13 October 2024. Photo: Steve Jurvetson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

SpaceX is also adding towers. On 11 and 12 September, crews at Starbase lifted Ship 42 into catch position on the new Pad 2 tower, cycled the chopstick arms, and connected and disconnected the Ship Quick Disconnect arm, the hardware that links the vehicle to ground systems, Startup Fortune reported. According to SpaceX, the new pad has shorter chopsticks, electromechanical actuators and a strengthened quick disconnect arm. In Florida, SpaceX's vice president of launch, Kiko Dontchev, said on 21 October that the pad 39A infrastructure is "effectively complete". On the first Florida launch, which SpaceX hopes to fly by the end of the year, that tower will try to catch the booster while the Ship circles Earth about six times before landing at Starbase.

The quick disconnect arm that fuels Starship on the Starbase tower, two days after the first orbital launch attempt in April 2023. Photo: Jenny Hautmann / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not build launch towers, and we found no ABB robot working at a launch pad. The nearest job ABB robots already do is the automatic connection. At the ferry crossing between Helsingør and Helsingborg, ABB supplied the first automated shore-side charging stations, built around its IRB 7600 industrial robot. 3D laser scanning guides the approach. In the last 400 mm the robot reaches out, pulls the shore cable from the ferry and moves its connectors onto matching connectors below. A quick disconnect arm on a launch tower does a similar job with propellant lines, at a far larger scale. A robot making that kind of connection at a pad is a possibility; no one has announced such a project.

An ABB robot reaches out from a shore-side charging station toward one of the battery ferries on the Helsingør to Helsingborg route. Photo: ABB

What tower catches could change for launch sites and factories

A caught booster still has to be checked before it flies again. BGR notes that the tower lets SpaceX inspect and prepare a booster for its next flight without moving it to a separate facility, and SpaceX describes the goal as airline-like operations, with several launches of the same booster in a day. Musk has said he wants more than 10,000 Starship launches a year by 2030. ABB has a small precedent: the London start-up Sensor Coating Systems uses an ABB IRB 1200 to steer a laser over jet engine and gas turbine components and read coatings that record the highest temperature they reached, from 150 to 1500 °C. ABB says the robot made testing almost a third faster than the gantry it replaced.

An engineer at Sensor Coating Systems works beside an ABB IRB 1200 that steers a laser over a test part. Photo: ABB

For homes, the effect shows up in orbit. Flight 14 on 28 September, the first to reach orbit, carried the first 26 Starlink V3 satellites of a broadband constellation SpaceX expects to grow to about 100,000 spacecraft. ABB hardware already flies on SpaceX rockets: an ABB-built optical sensor on GHGSat's satellite Hugo went up in January 2021 to map methane emissions. For factories, Startup Fortune called the second Starbase tower "factory logic applied to rockets". Boosters and Ships are built in Texas and shipped by barge to Florida, where the 380-foot Gigabay will stand them upright for the pad. The nearest factory version of catching is a robot picking parts off a moving belt with conveyor tracking, and cells like that are usually tested first in RobotStudio.

ABB FlexPicker delta robots picking small packs off a moving conveyor. Photo: ABB

A catching tower is also a single point of failure. If it is damaged or being reworked, the reuse schedule slows down, and Startup Fortune notes that a second tower lets SpaceX test and repair without forcing everything through one set of chopsticks. Nobody has caught a Ship yet, and Musk only called success on the next flight "more likely than not". Falcon 9 launches from Cape Canaveral are pausing for about six weeks while teams prepare for the first Florida Starship mission. Even SpaceX's own engineers doubted the idea: former SpaceX engineer Tom Mueller told Bloomberg's Odd Lots in September that when Musk proposed the chopsticks, "We all just rolled our eyes like, this is crazy." His view now: "If it's possible, it's solvable, according to SpaceX."

The Starship launch tower under construction at pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center in August 2022. Photo: Charles Boyer / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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