The first-ever orbital mission of SpaceX’s massive new Starship will be essentially a metallic flick, according to company founder and CEO Elon Musk.
Musk said last week that Starship has about a 50% chance of success on its first orbital test flight, which SpaceX aims to launch from its South Texas site in the next month or so.
Musk said on March 7, during a period Interview at the Morgan Stanley conference (Opens in a new tab). “So, it won’t be boring!”
Related: SpaceX’s first orbital spacecraft looks super cool in these fuel test photos
SpaceX is developing the Starship to carry people and cargo to the Moon and Mars, and to perform a variety of other spaceflight missions. Musk told the conference that the giant stainless-steel craft will be the most powerful rocket ever to fly, boasting about 2.5 times more thrust than NASA’s iconic Saturn V rocket.
The Starship was designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, which Musk sees as a major achievement necessary to make the colonization of Mars and other ambitious exploration work possible.
SpaceX is building several Starship vehicles at the South Texas site, which the company calls Starbase, and plans to launch them in relatively quick succession over the coming months.
“So I think we have about an 80% chance of getting into orbit this year,” Musk said in his March 7 interview. “It will likely take us another two years to achieve complete and rapid reuse.”
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Not surprisingly, Musk has sought to downplay expectations ahead of the highly anticipated orbital starship. Rockets often fail on their first flight, as we saw earlier this month with Japan’s new H3 launcher and in January with ABL Space System’s RS1.
And we’ve heard similar words from Musk before: We all prepared for SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy to crash and burn on its first-ever takeoff attempt.
“Hopefully you get it far enough from the pad that it doesn’t damage the pad. I’d even consider that a win, honestly,” Musk said of Heavy in July 2017.
Soaring high above those low expectations, Falcon Heavy successfully deployed Musk’s red Tesla Roadster, and mannequin driver in a “Starman” spacesuit, into orbit around the sun in February 2018.
But the Falcon Heavy is essentially a different kind of workhorse to the SpaceX Falcon 9; It connects three Falcon 9 first stages together, with a payload-carrying upper stage sitting atop the central booster. The starship is a more complex and new vehicle; It uses 33 of SpaceX’s next-generation Raptor engines in its Super Heavy first stage and six Raptors in its upper stage, for example. (The Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy both use SpaceX’s venerable Merlin engine.)
You’ll want to hear about the spacecraft’s next orbital flight, when it happens and how it ends. As Musk said, it won’t be boring.
Mike Wall is the author of “outside (Opens in a new tab)Book (Major Grand Publishers, 2018; illustration by Carl Tate), a book about the search for aliens. Follow him on Twitter @employee (Opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @employee (Opens in a new tab) or Facebook (Opens in a new tab).
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