The stupefying and stupendous capture of a Starship rocket earlier this month by two mechanical arms marked a significant step forward in SpaceX’s efforts to forever alter humanity’s relationship with the heavens.

Yet as remarkable as the rocket catch was, it represents but a single step on a long path. SpaceX seeks to make launch cheap, frequent, and reliable with Starship, and the company is working toward a day when rockets are routinely caught by the launch tower, set back on a launch mount, refueled, and flown again within hours. SpaceX says these efforts will one day culminate in Starships landing on the Moon and Mars.

Critics of the Starship architecture say it is inefficient because of the mass refueling that must occur in low-Earth orbit for the spacecraft to travel anywhere. For example, fully topping off a Starship that can land humans on the Moon and return them to lunar orbit may take a dozen or more tanker flights. But this only seems stupidly impractical under the old space paradigm, in which launch is expensive, scarce, and unreliable. Such criticism seems less salient if we imagine SpaceX reaching the point of launching a dozen Starships a week or more in a few years.

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Los Angeles has long had a passionate love affair with French cinema, dating back more than 60 years ago when there were lines around the block to get into theaters showing the latest works from cinema masters such as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and others.  Local cineastes later got their French film fixes every year […]

Regular moviegoers — and even some Academy members — often believe that directing an animated feature means standing over an artist’s shoulder and simply saying, “Draw this.” But the six directors selected for Variety’s third annual Pixels and Pencils series at this year’s SCAD Savannah Film Festival — Josh Cooley (“Transformers One”), Adam Elliot (“Memoir […]

Sarah Hyland has tirelessly used her celebrity to bring awareness to two issues very close to her heart — animal welfare and domestic abuse. On Oct. 30, Variety will honor her at the upcoming Power of Women gala in Los Angeles with the first Variety Courage Award, presented by Purina, which honors both issues simultaneously. […]

It takes a village to make a movie, but when it comes to producers, at best they’re stereotyped as the money people — at worst, their efforts are nullified by honorary titles handed out like Halloween candy among anyone in need of recognition. It can be difficult to discern what producers do because unlike regulated […]

The professionals on Variety’s Women’s Impact Report navigated Hollywood’s turbulent 2023 only to find more rocky roads in 2024. Layoffs, a production downturn and other woes dogged the entertainment business – but those were offset by the creation of blockbuster movies, series and music that captivated global audiences, alongside memorable characters, not to mention the […]

Approximately one-third of the Netflix true crime thriller “Woman of the Hour” takes place on set of “The Dating Game,” where real-life serial killer Rodney Alcala was a contestant in the 1970s. So, production designers for the Anna Kendrick-directed film had two missions: to accurately recreate the well-known set and to make that colorful, cheery […]

Hollywood may be synonymous with moviemaking, but Los Angeles has historically been fickle about supporting a major film festival. AFI Fest, which will unfurl the red carpet for opening night on Wednesday, hopes to certify its status as the city’s landmark festival, especially after seeing an encouraging growth in presales this fall. On the first […]

It was almost midnight on Emmy Awards Sunday. The crowd at the Netflix after-party in Hollywood was thinning fast. Those who were left on that September evening were called to action by the DJ with a “last dance” alert — a Netflix tradition that brought all of the streamers’ remaining staffers to the dance floor […]

Amy Poehler is ready to laugh. Poehler, who will be honored with Variety’s Legends and Groundbreakers Award at the Newport Beach Film Festival on Oct. 20, notes there is a running joke around the offices of her production company, Paper Kite. “You know how people talk about living in unprecedented times? We’re like, ‘Let’s get […]

Any director would love to land Mahershala Ali for their film. Now imagine getting the two-time Oscar-winner for your first feature. That’s what happened to Daniel Klein in 2000 when he hired the young actor to star in his film, which was never released or even formally presented outside screenings at a small regional film […]

Caryn Mandabach’s storied career as one of the most successful producers in television has something that few others in her field can claim — longevity of nearly 50 years. During that time, her output has included sitcoms (the original “One Day at a Time,” “The Cosby Show,” “3rd Rock From the Sun,” “That ’70s Show,” […]

SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers from Season 3 of “The Lincoln Lawyer,” now streaming on Netflix. “The Lincoln Lawyer” amps up the action for the third season of the popular Netflix show, culminating in two dramatic episodes that might leave viewers in shock. Defense attorney Mickey Haller, played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, also finds time to […]

As ill-fated coffee shop burglar Pumpkin in Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” Tim Roth knows the truth about a privileged piece of movie mythology. “We tend to know only as much as [our character] would know, but one thing that I do know because my character would know, which is what’s in the suitcase,” Roth reveals. […]

Celebrating its 30th anniversary on Oct. 14, “Pulp Fiction” has left a massive footprint on moviemaking. Originally conceived as an anthology by writer-director Quentin Tarantino and his longtime friend, collaborator and Video Archives coworker Roger Avary, the film evolved into a funny, violent, endlessly inventive, non-linear odyssey. In addition to reviving the career of John […]

BOCA CHICA BEACH, Texas—SpaceX accomplished a groundbreaking engineering feat Sunday when it launched the fifth test flight of its gigantic Starship rocket and then caught the booster back at the launch pad in Texas with mechanical arms seven minutes later.

This achievement is the first of its kind, and it's crucial for SpaceX's vision of rapidly reusing the Starship rocket, enabling human expeditions to the Moon and Mars, routine access to space for mind-bogglingly massive payloads, and novel capabilities that no other company—or country—seems close to attaining.

The test flight began with a thundering liftoff of the 398-foot-tall (121.3-meter) Starship rocket at 7:25 am CDT (12:25 UTC) from SpaceX's Starbase launch site in South Texas, a few miles north of the US-Mexico border. The rocket's Super Heavy booster stage fired 33 Raptor engines, generating nearly 17 million pounds of thrust and gulping 20 tons of methane and liquid oxygen propellants per second at full throttle.

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When Lamorne Morris was cast as Garrett Morris (no relation) in “Saturday Night” — the movie about the 90 minutes leading up to the first 1975 broadcast of “Saturday Night Live” — he ignored explicit instructions from director Jason Reitman by reaching out to the man he was to portray. Garrett Morris’ place in “SNL” […]

When an arrogant, aging, iconic comedian of yesteryear met an overly confident, young up-and-coming comic beginning to make his mark on the biz, it was pretty much a given that their worlds would clash. And in Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night” — a “based-on-a-true-story” account of what happened 90 minutes before the 1975 debut of “Saturday Night […]

Ellen Rapoport will be in the middle of pitching a new series idea to executives over Zoom when she spots it: the tell-tale sign that someone’s not paying attention. “I mean, we know who’s checking their email,” says the creator-showrunner of the Max and Starz series “Minx.” “You’re not as slick as you think you […]