The American aerospace company SpaceX has scheduled a test flight of the most powerful giant rocket ever built, the Starship, for next Monday. “Success perhaps, excitement guaranteed,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk wrote on Twitter. Launch is scheduled for 2 p.m. ET from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Texas.
The US space agency NASA currently plans to use Starship as a landing module as part of its Artemis program at the earliest in 2025. The Starship rocket is significantly larger and more powerful than NASA’s SLS rocket, which the space agency plans to use to launch astronauts into lunar orbit starting in 2024.
In February, nearly all of the Starship rocket’s first stage engines were successfully ignited during a test at the Boca Chica missile base. SpaceX founder Elon Musk then stated that the 31 engines fired during the test were “enough to achieve orbit.”
To the moon and beyond
SpaceX has long-term plans to use the spaceship to deliver cargo and people to the Moon, Mars and even further into space. When fully assembled, the rocket is 118 meters high, making it the largest spacecraft ever built. Even the Saturn V rockets that took American astronauts to the moon weren’t that big.
Costing about $5 billion, the rocket consists of two stages: The first stage includes engines and fuel systems dubbed “Super Heavy.” “Starship” is the second stage, the actual spaceship for the passengers.
“life insurance” for humanity
The Starship is also said to be the most powerful rocket ever, capable of carrying up to 100 tons into orbit. But Musk wants to reach much further for the stars. At the launch of the rocket in 2019, he presented his vision for human colonization of Mars, a “life insurance policy” in the event of a devastating catastrophe on Earth, he said.
At the same time, Musk did not hide the enormous challenges of this project. “It’s going to be tight, dangerous, difficult, very hard work, it could kill you,” he said.
Musk also promised that SpaceX could push the cost of a rocket launch to about $10 million in the coming years. This could revolutionize space travel and make it interesting as a commercial means of transportation. While a flight from the US to Singapore takes 20 hours, in a rocket it would take about 45 minutes, Musk said.
Source: Krone
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