SpaceX will hit a big milestone this year on its road to Mars, if all goes according to plan. The company is developing a giant rocket known as Starship to help make Mars colonization and a variety of other ambitious exploration feats possible. Starship prototypes have taken just a handful of low-altitude hops off Earth’s surface to date, but the vehicle is on target to earn its orbital wings in the relatively near future, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said.
I feel, at this point, highly confident that we’ll get to orbit this year,” Musk said Thursday night (Feb. 10) during a livestreamed Starship update from Starbase, SpaceX’s facility in South Texas, near the Gulf Coast hamlet of Boca Chica Village.
SpaceX is developing Starship to take people and cargo to the moon, Mars and other deep-space destinations. The system consists of two elements: a huge first-stage booster known as Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft called Starship.
When fully stacked, a Starship vehicle towers about 390 feet (119 meters) above the ground. That’s taller than any other rocket ever built; the previous record holder, NASA’s Saturn V moon rocket, stood 363 feet (111 m) tall. And Starship’s thrust will be more than twice that of the iconic Saturn V, Musk said.
Both Super Heavy and Starship are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a cost-saving breakthrough that Musk and SpaceX believe will revolutionize spaceflight and exploration. If everything goes well, for example, each Starship vehicle will be capable of launching from Earth’s surface every six to eight hours, and every Super Heavy will be able to do so roughly every hour, on missions that deliver up to 150 tons of payload to orbit, Musk said.
Such incredibly high flight rates would bring per-mission costs down dramatically. It may be as little as a few million dollars per flight — maybe even as low as a million dollars per flight,” Musk said. “These are crazy low numbers by space standards.
Source: space
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