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Comment by krisoft | Hacker News Reader

Oh. Interesting! I haven't thought of that. It sounds super cool, although my gut reaction is that it would be a lot of work for not much bang.

My childish imagination pictures the proposal as the Agena target vehicle from the Gemini IX test flight. There the fairing did not separate correctly leaving the docking target looking like a hungry space alligator: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/5-s66-37966-...

One could imagine the aligator gobling up a drifting second stage. :D It would absolutely not look like that in reality, but if life were a cartoon that is how it would happen. :)

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> it would be a lot of work for not much bang.

I don't know. Surely it will be a sellable feature of Starship eventually to service and/or return aging sats from orbit. Grabbing an F9 second stage feels like the perfect way to demonstrate that capability. It's not like they're going to have a shortage of Starships returning from orbit in the future.

Cross between The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker?

Low orbits clean themselves up relatively quickly though, and that’s where most of the newest satellites are going.

One of the Shuttle’s selling points was exactly this mission. Apparently it recovered a total of five satellites, three of which were research satellites launched specifically with the expectation of being recovered ahead of time. The other two were mis-launched into the wrong orbit because of a rocket failure. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/15094/what-satelli...

IIRC one of the initial animations had a landing second stage, but it was probably harder than expected (or it was just marketing material).

> IIRC one of the initial animations had a landing second stage

Of Falcon 9?

Yes, they were aiming for that, and put significant engineering effort towards it before it was deemed too difficult, and instead to focus on Starship, which is a second stage design for re-use from the ground up.

(Same story for catching faring halves in a net on a ship.. they tried and tried, and ended up just making them a little tougher and letting them land in the ocean before fishing them out.

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