SpaceX's massive Starship rocket could finally live up to its bold name.
The future iteration of Starship, which conducted its third test flight ever last week, will go interstellar, according to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk.
“This spacecraft is designed to traverse our entire solar system and beyond into the cloud of objects surrounding us. Future spacecraft, larger and more advanced, will travel to other star systems,” Musk said. Via X said Early Monday morning (March 18).
Related: Enjoy SpaceX Starship's third flight experience in stunning images
The spacecraft consists of two stainless steel components: a massive first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 165-foot (50-meter) upper-stage spacecraft known as the Starship, or just the ship.
Both vehicles are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, and both are powered by SpaceX's next-generation Raptor engines — 33 for Super Heavy and six for Ship.
When stacked, the spacecraft is about 400 feet (122 meters) tall. It is the largest, most powerful, and capable rocket ever built Up to 165 tons (150 metric tons) to Earth orbit in its reusable configuration. For comparison, SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket has a maximum payload capacity of About 25 tons (23 metric tons).
The spacecraft performed very well in the test flight last week, making serious progress over its first two flights, which occurred in April and November of last year. For example, the first test mission lasted only four minutes and the second ended about eight minutes after launch. But Thursday's (March 14) flight lasted about 50 minutes, and ended when the ship broke up while reentering Earth's atmosphere.
SpaceX sees Starship helping humanity settle the Moon and Mars. NASA supports this vision: The agency has selected Starship as the first manned lunar lander for its Artemis program. If all goes according to plan, Starship will send astronauts to the moon for the first time on the Artemis 3 mission, which is tentatively scheduled to launch in September 2026.
More work and several test flights will be needed to make the spacecraft ready to carry astronauts into deep space. Getting an interstellar version up and running would require a much bigger leap, a step that is difficult to imagine today.
Humanity is not yet close to developing a spacecraft that can travel between the stars on a reasonable time scale; The distances are so frighteningly huge. For example, the closest star to our Sun, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away. That's about 25 trillion miles (40 trillion kilometers). It would take a probe powered by conventional rocket propulsion tens of thousands of years to cover that strange terrain.
Researchers have ideas on how to make the trip more rewarding. For example, the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative is working on a system that would accelerate sailboats to the speed of light by 20% using ultra-powerful ground-based lasers. Such vehicles could reach Proxima Centauri just 20 years or so after liftoff, if all goes well.
This is a very big “if”. The Breakthrough Starshot vehicle will be small, with objects about the size of a postage stamp. Developing an interstellar vehicle large enough to carry people will be a much longer task.
This is clearly what Musk had in mind, given that this future spacecraft will be “much larger” than the current giant spacecraft. You and I probably won't be around to see this futuristic vehicle fly, if it happens; The Breakthrough Starshot program, announced in 2016, was eyeing a potential first launch in the 2030s or 2040s, and as of this timeline She may be ambitious.
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