The other half of SpaceX’s Starship space shuttle system is starting to come to light.
During the past three months, three full prototypes of the 165 meter long (50 meter) Starship spacecraft have been launched on high altitude test flights, each with impressive but ultimately explosive results. However, the company has not shown any versions of Super Heavy, the 230 meter high (70 m) booster that Starship will launch from Earth – so far.
“First Super Heavy booster”, founder and CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk said via Twitter Thursday afternoon (March 18), where he posted a photo of the large rocket on the company in South Texas, near the Gulf Coast town of Boca Chica.
“Booster 1” is a production finder that finds out how to build and transport a 70-meter stage. Booster 2 will fly, “Musk said. another Thursday tweet.
Starship and Super Heavy: SpaceX’s Mars colonizing vehicles in images
SpaceX develops Starship and Super Heavy to bring humans and payloads to the moon, Mars and other distant destinations. Both vehicles will be fully reusable, Musk said. Super Heavy will return to Earth shortly after takeoff for a vertical landing, as the first phases of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets already do, and Starship will be able to make many trips to and from Mars or the moon. . (Starship will be powerful enough to launch itself from both bodies, but it needs Super Heavy to get off the much more massive Earth.)
Starship and Super Heavy will soon start flying if everything goes according to Musk’s plan. The billionaire entrepreneur recently said that SpaceX plans to spin Starship sometime this year, and that he envisions the Starship Super Heavy duo. fully operational by 2023.
SpaceX already has a Starship mission on the books with a target date of 2023 – the “dearMoon” flight around the nearest cosmic neighbor of the Earth, bought by the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.