This craft could take crew on round-trips to Mars
But it is the first version of a spaceship design that Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and founder of the rocket company SpaceX, hopes will be humanity’s first ride to Mars.
Within a month or two, he says optimistically, this prototype of the Starship spacecraft — without anyone aboard — will blast off to an altitude of 12 miles (19km, 62,336ft), then return to the ground in one piece. “It’s going to be pretty epic to see that thing take off and come back,” Musk said late on Saturday at a SpaceX facility outside Brownsville, where Starship is being built. The update on his mega-rocket was timed to coincide with the anniversary of SpaceX’s first successful launch 11 years ago. SpaceX has a steady business putting satellites in orbit and carrying cargo to the International Space Station. But whether the company can meet its founder’s aims of taking people to Mars is yet to be seen.
Starship is 164 feet high and 30 feet in diameter. It will be paired with a behemoth booster stage called the Super Heavy, and the full rocket will be 387 feet tall and able to lug more than 220,000 pounds (99790kg) to orbit. That would be about as powerful as the Saturn 5 rocket that took Nasa astronauts to the moon 50 years ago, but able to fly again and again and again.
He said SpaceX could still meet timelines he set out a few years ago — landing a Starship on the moon and Mars within the next few years. Musk, however, has a history of setting aspirational schedules that turn out to be too optimistic.
Despite such futuristic ambitions, the Starship, made of stainless steel, reflected an imperfect, handcrafted sheen of an earlier era.
“It’s like you drove into a Flash Gordon movie or something,” said Andrew Goetsch, who lives in the nearby hamlet of about 30 homes and is thrilled to have a front row view of Musk’s space dreams, a sentiment not shared by all of his neighbours. “It’s not often they build a rocket where you can get close enough for it to fall on you,” Goetsch said.
Musk originally had planned to use high-tech carbon fiber, but switched to denser stainless steel. It is cheaper, easier to work with, becomes stronger in the ultracold temperatures of space and has a higher melting temperature that can more easily withstand the heat of re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
Experts say the technology of Starship lies within the realm of the possible, without requiring impossible physics or unlikely technological leaps. Indeed, Starship employs many ideas that were studied decades ago but never built.
What is more puzzling to them is how SpaceX can make money with Starship. Musk agreed that it was far larger than necessary to launch current satellites. For now, Musk conceded, there is not much of a commercial market — “not that’s especially relevant” — for Starship to fill. He said SpaceX was continuing to study using Starship as a speedy — likely expensive — way to travel around the world, New York to Tokyo in 30 minutes.
“It’s basically an ICBM that lands,” Musk said. “Nothing gets there faster than a ICBM. It’s just minus the nuclear bomb and add landing.”
[1][2][3][4]
References
from US News Headlines, Latest USA News, America Breaking News - Times of India https://ift.tt/2otQpYj
Post a Comment