For Elon Musk, the spacecraft is actually a Martian ship. He envisions a fleet of spaceships carrying settlers to the Red Planet in the coming years.
To achieve that ultimate goal, the spacecraft, which is being developed by Mr. Musk's rocket company SpaceX, will have to be big. Stacked atop what SpaceX calls a super-heavy booster, the Starship rocket system will be, by almost any measure, the largest and most powerful ever built.
It's the longest rocket ever built — measuring 397 feet long, or about 90 feet longer than the Statue of Liberty including the base.
And it has the most engines ever in a rocket booster: Super Heavy has 33 of SpaceX's powerful Raptor engines sticking out of its bottom. When these engines lift Starship from the launch pad in South Texas, they will generate 16 million pounds of thrust at full speed.
NASA's new Space Launch System rocket, which made its maiden flight in November 2022, holds the current record for maximum rocket thrust: 8.8 million pounds. Maximum thrust for the Saturn V rocket that took NASA astronauts to the Moon during the Apollo program was relatively paltry: 7.6 million pounds.
The most transformative feature of Starship is that it is designed to be completely reusable. The Super Heavy booster is scheduled to land much like SpaceX's smaller Falcon 9 rockets, and the Starship will be able to return from space tumbling through the atmosphere like a sky diver before pivoting into a vertical position for landing.
This means that all the really expensive pieces — like the 33 Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster and six additional Raptors in the Starship itself — will be used over and over again instead of being tossed into the ocean after a single flight.
This would reduce the cost of sending payloads into orbit, to less than $10 million to transport 100 tons into space, Mr. Musk predicted.
The Starship and Super Heavy are shiny because SpaceX made them out of stainless steel, which is cheaper than using other materials like carbon composites. But one side of the spacecraft is covered with black tiles to protect the spacecraft from the extreme heat it will encounter if it travels far enough on its journey to re-enter the atmosphere.
“Explorer. Unapologetic entrepreneur. Alcohol fanatic. Certified writer. Wannabe tv evangelist. Twitter fanatic. Student. Web scholar. Travel buff.”
