SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says his company’s Starship super-rocket will “allow us to inhabit other worlds … to make life as we know it multiplanetary” — and today he’s explaining how he plans to get from here to there.
Musk is due to give his presentation at 7 p.m. CT (5 p.m. PT) at SpaceX’s construction, test and launch facility near Boca Chica in South Texas. It’ll be live-streamed via SpaceX’s YouTube channel.
Today’s talk follows up on similar big-picture presentations that Musk delivered at the International Astronautical Congress in 2016 in Mexico, and in 2017 in Australia.
This time, however, the billionaire alpha geek will have a unique prop in the background: a 165-foot-tall, 30-foot-wide prototype that looks like the shiny, pointy-topped rockets envisioned in the 1950s.
The Starship Mk1 has taken shape over the course of mere weeks, following up on last month’s “short hop” test of a smaller prototype nicknamed Starhopper.
That rocket was equipped with one of SpaceX’s methane-fueled Raptor engines, and rose to a height of 500 feet at Boca Chica. Starship Mk1 triples the oomph, with three Raptors. Musk has said it could start out going as high as 12 miles next month, as part of a test program leading to orbital flights.
A similar craft, dubbed the Mk2, is taking shape at SpaceX’s facilities in Florida.
The hurry-up Starship development effort, which has been known to go into all-nighters at Boca Chica, is meant to lead to the creation of a full-scale Starship spaceship powered by six Raptor engines. And that’s not all: Starship would be launched from Earth atop a taller 35-Raptor booster stage dubbed the Super Heavy.
Musk figures that’s what it’s going to take to fulfill his vision of making humanity a multiplanet species. His vision calls for getting the Starship / Super Heavy launch system ready for prime time in the early 2020s.
Potential applications range from deploying thousands of satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink mega-constellation in low Earth orbit, to sending Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and other travelers around the moon in the early 2020s, to delivering the goods for a “Moon Base Alpha” on the lunar surface, to transporting a hundred settlers at a time to Mars beginning in the mid- to late 2020s.
Musk has said Starship and Starlink will be the focus for SpaceX’s long-term future, and he’s willing to commit billions of dollars. Just in the past year, SpaceX has reported investment rounds set at $540 million, $500 million and $300 million to help fund the effort.
Starship and Starlink aren’t SpaceX’s most pressing short-term priorities, however, at least in NASA’s view. SpaceX and Boeing are both behind their previously published schedules for developing space taxis for transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
SpaceX flew a robotic test mission of its Crew Dragon (without a crew) to the space station and back in March, but a test-stand explosion in April forced the company to put plans for an in-flight abort test and the first crewed mission on hold. The crewed mission is now expected to take place sometime next year.
Boeing’s Starliner space taxi development effort has encountered similar delays, and Starliner’s first crewed mission is also expected next year. But the fact that SpaceX is putting so many resources into Starship, and so visibly, prompted NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine to issue a cautionary tweet on the eve of Musk’s scheduled talk. “It’s time to deliver” on the commercial crew program, he wrote:
Bridenstine also retweeted a Twitter-sized interpretation of that tweet, posted by Ars Technica’s Eric Berger:
I would not read this as a shot to SpaceX, but rather a reflection of Jim’s desire to see all NASA contractors meet their deadlines for government contracts. https://t.co/WNMod2wW3T
— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) September 27, 2019
Will Musk address the full range of SpaceX’s priorities in today’s talk? Will he significantly revise his vision for interplanetary space travel, or his timetable? How deeply will he dive into the nuts and bolts of Starship’s workings? For answers to all those questions, stay tuned.