Samsung hasn’t officially unveiled the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra yet. However, that hasn’t stopped luxury customisation company Caviar from putting its own version up for sale.

The bespoke handset pays tribute to football icon Lionel Messi. It wraps Samsung’s upcoming foldable in 24-karat gold and handcrafted artwork, with a price tag to match.

Caviar is charging $13,130 for the limited-edition device. This makes it more than six times as expensive as the Galaxy Z Fold 7’s $2,000 launch price. If Samsung’s next Ultra model lands in a similar range, the price difference will be significant.

The custom phone features a handcrafted cloisonné enamel portrait of Messi in Argentina’s national colours. Alongside this, it offers 24-karat gold accents, the Argentina Football Association crest, a commemorative 2022 FIFA World Cup badge, and Adidas branding. Buyers also receive a bespoke presentation box finished in royal blue with additional gold detailing. They get a custom Caviar key as well.

Anduril Industries revealed Thunder today at the Farnborough Airshow, a Group 5 autonomous attack rotorcraft developed jointly with Archer Aviation. The platform is designed from the start to fly alongside current and next-generation crewed attack and assault helicopters, multiplying their firepower while keeping human crews farther from the most dangerous parts of the fight.

Development began in 2024, thanks to a collaboration between the two companies. Archer offered their work on electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft and rotor technologies, while Anduril contributed their knowledge in Lattice mission autonomous software and defensive systems. They designed a tiltrotor from scratch that can take off and land vertically before converting to a smooth and efficient cruising flight. The key to all of this is a series hybrid-electric powertrain, as well as some clever tiltrotors that can change RPMs based on flight phase, all of which help to reduce power consumption, fuel burn in cruising mode, and noise profile while flying low.

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Thunder may be packed into a conventional shipping container and transported by road, rail, air, or sea, and it can also self-deploy over great distances. The main body and nose contain modular payload bays that may hold a variety of items, including ten air-to-ground missiles such as Hellfire, JAGM, and Anduril’s Barracuda-100M. Perhaps you’d prefer to carry sixteen air-launched effects like the Altius-600, or seventy-six 70 mm rockets. The nose bay can even contain a dozen counter-drone bombs, while electronics, sensors, and cargo may all be put into the same modular bays.

Thunder is designed to have the same range and speed of the Army’s next-generation Cheyenne II while carrying a payload comparable to that of an AH-64 Apache. Several test sorties have already been conducted on a full-scale prototype to iron out some of the major systems. The actual Thunder airframe is scheduled to fly in 2027.

Anduril’s autonomous capabilities are also controlled by its Lattice software. Thunder can operate alongside crewed helicopters, then safely separate from them, share a common tactical picture, and perform mission-critical duties with only high-level direction from a commander, removing the need for constant pilot control. And by attaching three of them to an Apache, you can increase the number of useful weapons without endangering more aircrew. Its design was influenced by lessons learnt in Ukraine about the vulnerability of low-flying helicopters to drones, air defenses, and other threats.

Thunder was designed to be more than just an attack aircraft. It can also execute long-range fire support, intelligence collection, maritime patrol or search for missing people, and perhaps anti-submarine operations. Archer plans to announce some commercial customers for the dual-purpose vehicle later this week, with an emphasis on freight and remote logistical operations that require the same vertical takeoff, range, and payload.

We don’t know how much Thunder will cost, but Anduril says it’ll be a fraction of the cost of a crewed attack helicopter and cheap enough that commanders will be ready to take some more risk if a drone is shot down. However, production will be based on commercial supply chains and manufacturing techniques designed expressly for eVTOL aircraft, which should help keep costs low and numbers high.

On a balcony not far from World Cup venue AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, a dot suddenly popped up on a large screen, representing an unwelcome drone snaking toward a rectangular no-fly zone. Within a few seconds, a “friendly” drone zipped past the balcony to intercept and encourage the unwelcome aircraft to turn back.

The wayward drone wasn’t identified using standard methods such as radar, however. Instead, its flight path was tracked by 5G cellular radios just like the ones you see on towers and buildings.

This proof-of-concept demo was put on by AT&T and Ericsson to show off their Integrated Sensing and Communication technology, timed to coincide with one of the world’s largest sporting events. Drones were the focus that day, but the same technology could be applied to track other subjects like vehicles or people within range of the 5G network.

Although it was a small-scale demo, it comes amid a growing proliferation of drones operating in areas they’re not supposed to fly. According to Reuters, the FBI said more than 700 drones were confiscated by US agencies during the World Cup, some of them piloted by operators who didn’t realize they were in no-fly zones that had been extended for the matches.

But as we’ve seen in Ukraine and Russia, tiny drones can be highly elusive and destructive — a nightmare scenario for planners of events like the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles or even small public gatherings.

Real-time data from a trio of towers

For this demonstration, the companies created a “multistatic sensing configuration” using three cell towers, each containing the same kind of Ericsson Massive MIMO, or multiple-input multiple-output, radios found on other nearby cell sites, with a sensing capability enabled. They were spaced about 1.6 miles away from the demo area.

When the rogue object was sensed by the network, well outside the no-fly zone, the system’s software classified it, using signal processing and AI algorithms, as a drone flying about 11 mph. If the drone had been a real threat, other agencies, such as law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security, would have received the same live data to determine what action to take.

Although only two drones were tracked during the demo, AT&T says the system can track swarms of them.

Why use the 5G network for this type of tracking?

Identifying flying objects isn’t new: Radar installations around the world continuously scan the skies to track aircraft and detect potential threats. But they tend to scan at high altitudes and require dedicated hardware to operate.

A cellular network, by contrast, already has an established footprint of towers and cell sites that provide continuous phone coverage across much of the US. The demonstration tracked drones flying at around 300 to 400 feet, but the range of detection can be up to 6 kilometers.

Robert Soni, vice president of Radio Access Network technology at AT&T, pointed to the company’s 75,000 sites across North America.

“This is a significant number that is difficult to replicate by building a purposeful radar,” Soni said during a briefing after the demo. “We’re also closer to the ground, and because of our angle of elevation, we can go down to a lower altitude than you could with traditional airborne-based radar. We’re able to see more of the nation.”

Akhil Gokul, vice president and head of technology for the Americas at Ericsson, explained that the density of towers enabled for sensing leads to greater accuracy “because you’re getting reflections [of radio frequency waves] from multiple towers,” he said. “You can get a much richer set of data that can be fed to our models.”

This approach also makes a 5G-based tracking system more resilient, with no single point of failure; cell networks already have the ability to automatically compensate when a tower goes offline for maintenance or during extreme weather events.

Demonstrating new uses for existing hardware is also a big part of the appeal of something like ISAC, because adding components to towers is expensive and time-consuming.

“I think the industry is always looking for what else the wireless network can do,” said Yigal Elbaz, senior vice president and network chief technology officer at AT&T. “Like anything else, you always want to drive to see what you can already do with your existing infrastructure.”

Pushing for 6G technologies today

The sensing technology that was demonstrated is expected to be part of the eventual 6G standards, but the AT&T and Ericsson people I talked to didn’t want to wait to get started on testing.

“From a technology point of view, this was viewed as a 6G capability, and this is something that’s actually being developed in the standards,” said Gokul. “What we’re doing in collaboration with AT&T is accelerating that much earlier.”

Disrupting the old process shifts the timelines for technologies that are needed in the next couple of years. Soni doesn’t want to wait for 2030 to start that cycle, around when 6G may start rolling out.

“[Previously,] standards have to get done first, proof of concepts happen second, trials happen later and then finally we see technology at home,” Soni said. “We’re trying to break that cycle … of the Gs themselves by introducing this early.”

The drone demonstration in Texas involved just two drones on the outskirts of an empty stadium, but it showed that the technology can track and identify objects in real time using existing 5G hardware. Real-world uses, from potential threats to assisting autonomous vehicles, aren’t going to wait for standards to mature, and neither are AT&T and Ericsson.

Editors’ note: Jeff Carlson’s travel costs for the drone demonstration were covered by Ericsson. The judgments and opinions of CNET are our own.

Jeff Carlson

Senior Writer

Jeff Carlson writes about mobile technology for CNET. He is also the author of dozens of how-to books covering a wide spectrum ranging from Apple devices and cameras to photo editing software and PalmPilots. He drinks a lot of coffee in Seattle.

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There was once a race to put out cameras with ever higher numbers of megapixels to snare customers eager to take the highest quality digital photos. These days, we know that things like optics, processing, and finer qualities of an image sensor are all very important beyond pure resolution. But, for a time, companies behaved as if megapixels mattered over all else.

But what if you could go farther—shooting not millions, but billions of pixels in a single image? That’s precisely what [Yannick Richter] came to Hackaday Europe to talk about, covering his Project Gigapixel build.

More Pixels

When it comes to building a consumer camera with higher resolution, manufacturers achieve this by creating an image sensor with a greater number of sensing elements. This, of course, can get expensive and difficult the farther you want to scale, particularly if you’re trying to fit more sensing elements into a given standard sensor size.

However, there are other ways to capture images in greater resolution that don’t require a larger image sensor. Namely, you can actually use quite a simple image sensor of limited resolution, and simply move it to various positions, capturing light all the while. Then, all you need to do is stitch the output together and you have a remarkably high resolution image. It might sound complicated, but as [Yannick] explains, it’s a perfectly cromulent way to build a gigapixel image.

[Yannick’s] project began with an old Epson flatbed scanner. This made the perfect donor for such a project, as it came with a linear image sensor with quite good resolution for scanning photographs and documents. The only problem is that it needs to move in a straight path in order to capture a full image. The goal was to build it into a scanner-style camera that was truly portable, which required some reverse engineering and creative design to make it into a practical tool for real-world photography. [Yannick] didn’t want to just stuff the existing scanner in a bodged-together camera body, either. He wanted to interface the sensor directly and build a custom linear-scanning camera from the ground up, with the high-resolution linear sensor mounted behind a nice medium-format Pentax lens.

The key was that the scanner in question—an Epson V370—used a Sony CCD scanning element, rather than a cheaper CIS element. A proper CCD sensor is more expensive, but produces better output, and is more suitable for the sort of imaging [Yannick] was trying to do with this build. Namely, by running the scanning element behind a medium format lens to capture incredibly high-resolution images at up to 40800 x 80000 pixels, or 3.2 gigapixels if you multiply it out.

The talk covers all the work that [Yannick] did to make this a fully functional camera. That included doing a deep dive into Epson documentation to figure out how to interface the sensor at all. Thankfully, service manuals provided enough detail on how the 12-line RGB sensor works to get the project over the line. Interfacing the sensor was achieved via reusing the ADC and timing generation hardware from the scanner itself, hooked up to a Raspberry Pi 5 and a RP2350.

Plenty of work was required to figure out how to properly offset all the R, G, and B pixels to line up properly into a coherent color image. [Yannick] also dives into the mechanical design, regarding how the sensor was assembled on a 100-millimeter linear drive to scan it behind the lens assembly to capture images. There were also issues generating a live preview that you’d get on any other digital camera, which is not exactly practical to generate from a scanning image sensor. Instead, a standard Raspberry Pi camera was included in the build for live preview to help with lining up a shot.

Perhaps the best part of the talk is when [Yannick] shows off the final results. The simple fact is that 3.2 gigapixel images capture a ton of detail when they’re taken well and focused correctly. A simple shot of some benchtop instruments doesn’t look like anything special, until [Yannick] shows that cropping in will let you read the codes off a 0603 SMD resistor. Obviously, the camera is limited when it comes to speed and it can’t really capture moving objects well. However, when it comes to grabbing very high resolution shots of still scenes, it’s a great performer. If taking gorgeously detailed landscapes or stunning architectural shots is your thing, you might find such a build an appealing proposition for your own needs.

The Sony PS-LX3BT is one of the first new turntables to leave Sony’s R&D department in years. It comes some time after the launch of the Sony PS-LX310BT, one of what TechRadar rightfully deems to be the best turntables for beginners — and has big shoes to fill, accordingly.

And fill them it sort-of does, at least in the most literal of senses. It shares a lot of physical attributes, aims for the same sleek aesthetic, and seeks to corner the same, well, corner of the market with user-friendly interfaces and a no-nonsense approach to playing records. It’s a shame it doesn’t quite stick the landing.

Apple TV is to screen director Sian Heder’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning “CODA,” a biopic about the life of a woman who got the government to take action over the rights of disabled people.

In 2022, Sian Heder directed and co-wrote “CODA,” which earned Apple TV the first-ever Best Picture Oscar for a streaming service. Apple immediately announced that it was backing Heder to direct a dramatization of Judy Heumann’s bestselling memoir, and the finished film is now heading for theaters and Apple TV.

Co-written by Heder and Rebekah Taussig, “Being Heumann” stars Ruth Madeley as Heumann. Best known for “Doctor Who” and Russell T. Davies’s “Years and Years,” Madeley has spina bifida and is wheelchair-bound.

Heumann contracted polio in the late 1940s aged 18 months and spent most of her life in wheelchairs. According to Entertainment Weekly, Heder was shown a documentary about her and cold-emailed Heumann about making a film of her life.

“She was so forceful and hilarious and blunt and empathetic and all of these contradictions,” says Heder. “And I thought, ‘I do need to tell this story, and I’d love to meet this woman.’”

Heumann became known as the mother of the Disability Rights Movement, chiefly because of her 1977 sit-in. Aiming to persuade President Carter to enact the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Heumann led sit-ins that occupied federal buildings including Washington, D.C., and New York City.

The protests were known as the 504 Sit-ins, after section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act which states that no otherwise qualified handicapped individual could be excluded from programs that receive federal funding. Heumann helped with the recognition of disabled rights and section 504 was finally enacted..

Heumann died unexpectedly in March 2023, aged 75. She had one Zoom call with actor Madeley before then. “I was completely in awe. I was so desperate for her to like me,” Ruth Madeley says. “I feel really privileged that she knew my name.”

“Her grit, her joy, and her complexities all make her so much fun to play,” she continued. “Also, to have Sian at the helm was a huge pull for me.”

Judy Heumann headed the 1970s sit-ins that led to greater disability rights – image credit: Apple TV

The film is based on the book “Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist” by Judy Heumann. Co-writer Rebekah Taussig is also the author of the 2020 memoir “Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body.”

“Being Heumann” is to open the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival, which runs from September 10, 2026, to September 20. It will then get a theatrical run from November 6, 2026, before streaming on Apple TV from November 13.

Whether or not “Being Heumann” has any chance at repeating Heder and Apple’s Oscar success depends on exactly how the film’s theatrical window is managed. Directly following Apple’s win, the Academy Awards introduced new rules which limit what films can qualify for the Oscars.

To be eligible for consideration, the initial one-week release of “Being Heumann” in theaters will have to include one of six US metro areas including Los Angeles County, New York, Chicago, the Bay Area, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Atlanta. It will then have to be followed by another week-long run in 10 of the top 50 US Markets, no later than 45 days after that initial release.

There are more rules, and they vary for different Oscar categories. But overall the rules have effectively made it harder for streamers to win the Best Picture Oscar.

Amazon’s search engine has become flooded with gibberish-named knockoff brands in recent years. To make your shopping experience a bit less phony, developer Josh Pigford built Knockoff, a free extension that will clean up your feed by automatically hiding or dimming listings from all those sketchy, mass-produced brands. 

Knockoff is available for Firefox, Chrome and all Chromium-based web browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Opera and Brave. It’s also available as a Safari extension. 

Pigford launched the tool earlier this month, and it’s since gone viral, with tens of thousands of downloads. A few days before the launch, Pigford posted on X, “Built a little chrome extension that lets you dim (or hide!) all the crap, mass-produced, fake brands on Amazon.” The post garnered 22,000 likes.

Knockoff is now live!

Filter out the knockoff crap brands on Amazon.

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Sorry to brands like WNPETHOME, EHEYCIGA, YXYL, LU&MN, JOYIN, TOMY, GODONLIF, YOOJEE, LINGTENG, LANEIGE, VISCOO, BIODANCE, COOFANDY, BALENNZ, TOSY and LUENX.https://t.co/9mLk0EAsfG https://t.co/K07lMkepOW

— Josh Pigford (@Shpigford) July 7, 2026

It works pretty simply. Once installed, any products from fake brands, dropshippers or otherwise suspicious vendors are marked and grayed out, highlighting the more reputable brands you might actually know. There’s also an option to automatically hide the fake brands so you don’t even have to see them at all. 

In an interview with 404 Media, Pigford says that Knockoff is built on prior extensions that aim to do this, such as AmazonBrandFilter and Amazon Brand Detector. The extension, which runs locally, doesn’t require an account, doesn’t send data to any company servers and doesn’t cost anything. It’s also open-source (as of version 0.7.2), and you can find the source code on GitHub.

So, how well does Knockoff work?

Anything sounds good on paper, but the proof is in the pudding. I took Knockoff for a test drive to see how well it filtered the mass-produced junk. 

My trial wasn’t terribly complicated. I searched for a variety of products across several categories using Knockoff’s stock settings to see how well the extension would filter out the knockoff brands without any additional tuning. 

The short answer is that it did quite well. While searching for vacuum cleaners, it left most of the listings intact since they were from known brands, including Shark, Bissell and Dyson. Only a few listings were grayed out, mostly because no brand name was listed in the product description. 

Solar lights fared much worse. Knockoff actively blocked dozens of listings for lack of brand names and also blocked listings from Jkimk, Technet, Tonulax and other unrecognized brands (most of which are stylized in all capital letters), while keeping listings for established brands, such as Brightown, a real company based in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Phone cases are where things start to get trickier. The extension blocked brands such as Supfine, Dumkery, Hiearcool and several others. However, it initially also blocked Torras, a well-known case brand with in-store stock at Best Buy, which holds thousands of global patents for many of its products. It doesn’t get much more real than Torras, but the company’s products were flagged because its name is stylized in all caps, which the extension checks. Torras was added as a trusted brand in subsequent updates.

Knockoff listed some lesser-known but still legitimate earbuds brands, such as Tozo and Linsoul, as real companies, while it properly flagged phony hand tool brands, including Wgge and Horusdy. Brands that aren’t recognized by the extension often appear highlighted, but on the product page, the extension flags them as suspected fakes or entirely unrecognized. 

It helps that Knockoff has a system for reporting brands that are incorrectly labeled as legitimate (or wrongly marked as fake). If the extension flags a product as fake when it’s legit, you can click the badge and “report as a real brand.” Likewise, if the extension flags a product as legit when it’s really fake, you can click the badge and “report as junk” when you click on a badge over a brand that the extension recognizes. You may have to turn on badges for good brands in the settings to do this. 

Since Knockoff’s launch, Pigford has released an update that addresses user responses, including a method to directly send feedback if you want to report a brand. The latest versions need a few extra permissions, but they’re mostly for enabling new features.

Knockoff is a good start for filtering junk

Overall, Knockoff is a useful extension in a digital marketplace dominated by AI-generated assets and unverified third-party products. 

When you’re shopping, the biggest benefit is avoiding low-quality off-brands. Even if you’re not actively shopping for anything, it’s fun (and terrifying) to see how many grayed-out product listings you can find in any given product category. We recommend turning on badges for known brands, but otherwise, the stock settings performed the best.

At the same time, Knockoff shows you brands likely to be fake on Amazon, but it doesn’t tell you which products are actually good or bad. Fake brands often come with fake or bot-written reviews more often than legitimate brands. 

Still, it all depends on what you’re shopping for. If all you need is a pack of zip ties for light cable management or to attach a tomato plant to a garden trellis, the ones sold by dropshippers will work just fine and save you a couple of bucks. 

And while Knockoff certainly makes it easier to shop for quality items, the extension still needs some fine-tuning and human analysis. Updates to the extension seem to be doing exactly that, so if you’re just now discovering the tool, it’s likely the extension has gotten even better over time.

Avoid fake brands without the extension

An eagle-eyed shopper can spot a knock-off brand from a mile away if they know where and how to look at product listings. 

The first step, according to Russell Holly, director of commerce content at CNET, is to look for the brand outside of Amazon.com. “If it seems like a string of random characters and that brand name isn’t selling elsewhere, there’s a good chance the seller is not the manufacturer,” said Holly. 

Holly also says to pay closer attention to negative reviews, since brands often fake only positive reviews. Negative reviews can be a better indicator of quality problems that may help explain why a product is cheaper than others in the same category. 

Similarly, you can also look for a brand’s product support. If the only way to report a problem is directly to Amazon, Holly says you’re most likely dealing with a dropshipper that doesn’t offer product support if something breaks. 

Another way to spot a fake brand is to find the same product sold under multiple brands. An example is a Broserengy alarm clock, Bluetooth speaker, phone charger combo. It is nearly identical to this product from Fansbe, including the RGB lights at the bottom, the placement (and labeling) of the buttons and the auxiliary USB port around the back for charging an accessory. These are two subtly different versions of the same product.

Since the first V2 rocket sailed above the Kármán line back in 1944 and right up until the modern era, the trajectory of most space-bound rockets was more or less the same: after expending their propellants they would either crash into some desolate steppe or plunge into the ocean. In either event, the rocket was disposable. The important bit up top might go on to explore the stars or send a human crew off on their mission, but the booster rocket that lifted the spacecraft out of the atmosphere was always going to be sacrificed for the cause.

But in the 1970s NASA had a wild idea: what if we didn’t smash a brand-new rocket valued at millions of dollars into the ocean every time we wanted to put something in orbit? Instead, they would build a hybrid space vehicle that blended the vertical takeoff and raw power of a rocket with the capabilities of an airplane, allowing it and whatever it was carrying to make a gentle runway landing at the end of its mission. As such, the Space Shuttle was born.

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know the Shuttle wasn’t quite the spaceflight revolution that NASA had hoped for. The age of reusable rockets didn’t truly begin until 2015, when SpaceX landed the first stage of their Falcon 9. To date they’ve repeated the feat nearly 600 times, all the while increasing the reliability and speed of their operations. Today the Falcon 9 is the most prolific launch vehicle in history, and nearly every other rocket in active development is being designed to include some element of reusability.

Most recently, China demonstrated that they could recover their Long March 10B rocket by gently bringing it down into what amounts to a giant butterfly net. While it might seem a bit quaint compared to rockets that land on their tails like something out of a 1950s sci-fi movie, the idea offers considerable promise.

There and Back Again

But why did it take 70+ years before we were able to regularly refly orbital-class rockets? It’s not that there’s anything inherently complex about reusing a spent rocket. Sure, there’s a case to be made that material science improvements have made the engines robust enough for repeated use. But even if you had to rebuild the engines after each flight it would still be better than slamming the whole vehicle into the ocean. Similarly, there’s nothing particularly unique about the structure of the Falcon 9 that enables it to fly multiple times — it’s a big metal tube with tanks inside of it, just like essentially every rocket that has flown before it.

The revolutionary technology demonstrated by SpaceX in 2015 didn’t have anything to do with making their rocket go up, it was that they were able to safely bring it back without damaging or physically altering it. The Falcon 9 first stage that came back to Earth was in the same condition it was when it left the launch pad eight minutes or so earlier, albeit with empty propellant tanks and a layer of soot on the outside.

As such, most of the variability we see when comparing the reuse of past, present, and future rockets comes not from how the vehicle ascends, but how it ultimately comes to rest back down on Earth.

Splashdown is Easy, But Rough

Without question, the easiest way to recover a rocket intact is to simply slow it down before it hits the surface of the ocean using parachutes This is how all American crewed capsules, and more applicably the Space Shuttle’s Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs), have been recovered after their flights.

But even when descending under multiple huge parachutes, splashdown isn’t exactly a gentle event. It could probably best be described as “survivable”, in that the vehicle and crew will come through the experience in one piece, but neither is likely to be terribly happy about it.

The situation of course ends up being even worse for the rocket, as its structure is going to be subjected to the brunt of the impact force. Additionally, a complex aerospace vehicle getting partially submerged in salt water is a recipe for corrosion and electrical issues, to say nothing of the thermal shock the hot engines will experience when getting dunked.

One could argue that the only reason this method of recovery worked for the Shuttle SRBs is because of their relative simplicity when compared to a liquid-fueled rocket capable of independent flight. At the risk of oversimplifying the structure of the SRB, at splashdown it was effectively a hollow tube with minimal avionics and thrust vector control (TVC) hardware that could simply be replaced before the next flight.

Still, the NASA document Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) Refurbishment Practices goes over the considerable work required to bring each booster back to flight status after coming down in the ocean. Given the challenges of refurbishing the boosters, it’s perhaps unsurprising that NASA elected to forgo their reuse on the Space Launch System despite its SRBs being largely identical to their Shuttle predecessors.

Teaching Rockets New Tricks

In the very early days, while they were still trying to reach orbit with the Falcon 1, SpaceX had actually considered a Shuttle SRB-style recovery procedure. But in the end they decided to outfit the Falcon 9 with deployable landing legs and the rest, as they say, is history.

Landing legs allow a rocket to come down on effectively any flat surface, be it a concrete pad next to the launch facility or a floating platform. But there are some fairly serious drawbacks to this approach. For one thing, the requirement for precise terminal guidance means parachutes are out of the question. The rocket needs fins, attitude thrusters, or other control surfaces to come down on the center of the pad.

It also means the rocket needs to perform a propulsive landing. That is, use its own primary engines to bring its velocity on touchdown to as close to zero as possible. This in turn requires engines that can not only restart in flight — a capability that has not traditionally been required by first stage boosters — but are able to throttle down low enough to control the rocket’s descent without simply pushing it back upwards. It’s difficult to overstate how unnatural a state of operation this is for a rocket. Indeed, it’s the antithesis of how nearly every rocket has operated since the Song Dynasty started experimenting with gunpowder in the 10th century.

Even if you can accomplish all that, the true cost of landing a rocket is in the extra mass. Although the legs will be stowed away and unused for 99.8% of the rocket’s flight time, it still has to lug all that weight uphill. If that wasn’t bad enough, there’s also the extra weight of whatever control mechanism is in place to guide the rocket’s descent trajectory as well as the propellant that needs to be kept in reserve for the landing burn.

All told, landing a rocket on legs comes with a massive payload penalty. In the case of the Falcon 9, the rocket’s maximum capacity to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) in its expendable configuration is approximately 22,800 kg (50,300 lb). But when outfitted with the hardware necessary to land, that number is reduced by nearly 25% to 17,500 kg (38,600 lb).

Dropping the Dead Weight

There was a time, not so very long ago, when critics doubted the financial viability of recovering and reusing rockets like the Falcon 9. But today, reuse has gone from theoretical to standard operating procedure. Outside of a few Old Space holdouts, it’s top of mind for every launch provider and critical for remaining competitive in a fast-moving commercial market. In November, Blue Origin even managed to land their New Glenn heavy-lift rocket on only its second flight.

So at this point the question isn’t whether or not future rockets will be reusable, but rather, what is the most efficient way to achieve that reusability?

With that in mind, it’s easy to see the appeal of China’s net recovery. While the rocket must still perform a propulsive descent — although in theory the necessary positional accuracy, and therefore the technical challenge, is somewhat reduced — it doesn’t need to have landing legs installed. This mass savings increases the vehicle’s useful payload capacity, which in turn makes it more profitable to operate. Achieving the same end goal while being easier and cheaper is an improvement in anyone’s book.

Admittedly, having the rocket come down in a huge net adds a certain amount of whimsy to the whole endeavor, but the overall logic is sound enough. It should also be said that SpaceX, for all the success they’ve had with landing their Falcon 9 on a set of deployable legs, are themselves planning on catching both the first and second stages of their next-generation Starship vehicle. Instead of a net, their goal is to pluck the rocket out of the air with a huge robotic pincer mechanism.

One is reminded of the old joke about how the Americans and Russians approached the problem of writing in space: NASA spent millions of dollars developing a pen that would work in microgravity, while their Russian counterparts simply used pencils. If China can demonstrate the ability to reuse a rocket they snagged in their net, the more elaborate methods of recovery employed by American rockets may one day look like a similarly overengineered solution.