An artists’s conception shows SpaceX’s Starship craft on Mars. (SpaceX Illustration)
NASA is helping SpaceX get a fix on potential landing sites on Mars for its Starship super-spaceship, with an emphasis on Arcadia Planitia and Amazonis Planitia, regions where deposits of water ice may be found.
Another focus of NASA’s reconnaissance campaign in Phlegra Montes, a mountainous area just west of Arcadia Planitia in Mars’ northern hemisphere.
Pictures of the candidate sites were captured from orbit by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in June and July, and included in last month’s roundup of MRO imagery.
After weeks of preparation, the prototype test vehicle for SpaceX’s monster spaceship, known as Starhopper, fired up its methane-powered Raptor rocket engine for the first time today and lifted ever so slightly off its Texas launch pad.
“Starhopper completed tethered hop,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk reported in a tweet. “All systems green.”
The round-topped rocket is meant to serve as a testbed for SpaceX’s interplanetary-class Starship, just as earlier testbeds known as the Grasshopper and the F9R Dev blazed a trail for SpaceX’s self-landing Falcon 9 rocket boosters.
Which is the illustration, and which is the actual Starship Hopper test rocket? The real rocket is on the left — and take note of the Starman standing by one of the fins. (Elon Musk via Twitter)
For weeks, photographers have been snapping pictures of a retro-looking, shiny stainless-steel rocket that’s been taking shape at SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas — and tonight, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk declared that assembly of the first Starship short-hop test rocket is complete.
The name change comes just days after Musk tweeted that the design for the spaceship is being radically revised once again. “New design is very exciting! Delightfully counter-intuitive,” he wrote.
Today’s report said that Goldman Sachs Group is leading the talks with potential investors this week. Neither Goldman Sachs nor SpaceX have publicly acknowledged the talks, however.
SpaceX has notched plenty of successes over the year to date, including 16 Falcon 9 rocket launches plus the first test launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket in February. Within the coming year, the California-based company is expected to execute its first crewed space launch, aimed at sending astronauts to the International Space Station.
Significantly more ambitious and capital-intensive projects are on SpaceX’s longer-range agenda: The company is working on a constellation of thousands of Starlink satellites that are designed to provide global internet access as well as a revenue stream that, over the long run, may be more substantial than the launch business. SpaceX’s team in Redmond, Wash., has been given the lead role in the Starlink project.
Then there’s the BFR, or Big Falcon Rocket: That super-heavy-lifter is designed to take on suborbital passenger flights between terrestrial destinations as well as trips to the moon and Mars. SpaceX has already signed up Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa for a flight around the moon in the 2020s.
Starlink and BFR are each expected to require billions of dollars of investment.
Maezawa is paying an undisclosed but reportedly substantial amount for the journey on SpaceX’s yet-to-be-built BFR spaceship, and there are scads of details to be worked out before the launch date, which is currently set for 2023.
Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk strike a pose at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. (Yusaku Maezawa via Twitter)
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk today introduced Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa as the first paying customer for a trip around the moon.
“Finally I can tell you that ‘I choose to go to the moon,’” Maezawa said, echoing President John F. Kennedy’s famous phrase.
Maezawa, 42, founded a mail-order retail business called Start Today in 1998, which spawned what’s now Japan’s largest fashion retail website, known as Zozotown. His net worth is estimated at more than $3 billion.
He’s made a name for himself as a musician and art collector as well as an entrepreneur. During tonight’s big reveal at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., Maezawa said he intended to invite six to eight artists from around the world, on the level of the late Pablo Picasso or Michael Jackson, to go around the moon with him.
A Tesla Model 3 car is dwarfed by the main body tool for SpaceX’s BFR spaceship. (Elon Musk via Instagram)
To build a big frickin’ spaceship, you need a big frickin’ rack to put it on. And SpaceX has the rack.
The company’s billionaire CEO, Elon Musk, took to Instagram tonight to show off the main-body construction tool — which is analogous to the turning mandrel tool that Boeing uses as a rack for a 787 composite fuselage while it’s being built up from layers of carbon fiber.
Billionaire Elon Musk (in the black hat) and his brother, Kimbal Musk (in the white hat), join in a rendition of “My Little Buttercup” at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. (SXSW via YouTube)
SpaceX is building its first Mars transport vehicle, also known as the BFR, and “making good progress” toward short-hop test flights on Earth by the middle of next year, CEO Elon Musk said today.
“We’re actually building that ship right now,” Musk said at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, during a Q&A with “Westworld” co-creator Jonathan Nolan, a longtime friend.
Today’s conversation ranged over all things Musk — from SpaceX and Tesla, to The Boring Company, Neuralink and the billionaire’s concerns about artificial superintelligence.
