Tag: Starship

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Elon Musk lays out fast and furious plan for Starship

Starship and Falcon 1
SpaceX’s Starship Mk1 prototype stands alongside a first stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket, which had its first successful orbital launch in 2008. If you look closely at this picture from SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility, you can see people to the left of the Starship rocket. (SpaceX via Twitter)

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk set a revved-up timeline tonight for testing and building a fleet of Starship rocket ships that he says would eventually take people on trips to the moon, Mars and other deep-space destinations.

Standing in front of SpaceX’s newly constructed Starship Mk1 prototype at the company’s South Texas facility, Musk said he expected the first 12-mile-high test flight to take place in a month or two.

His timeline called for building up to four more versions of the super-rocket and conducting the first orbital launch within six months. The next version, dubbed Starship Mk2, is already taking shape at SpaceX’s Florida facilities.

The first crewed orbital mission could take place as early as next year, Musk said.

In the past, even Musk has acknowledged that his timelines tend to be overly optimistic, but tonight he suggested that’s a feature, not a bug.

“If the schedule’s long, it’s wrong,” he told a crowd of journalists, employees and fans. “If it’s tight, it’s right.”

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Elon Musk tweets sneak peek at Starship vision

Starship Mk1
Members of SpaceX’s team in Texas use cranes to add rear moving fins to the Starship Mk1 prototype. (Elon Musk via Twitter)

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is talking up his Starship Mk1 prototype super-rocket in Texas, less than a week in advance of an eagerly awaited update on his plans for Starship trips to the moon, Mars and beyond.

Today’s sneak preview came in a flurry of tweets addressing some of the finer design points for Starship Mk1, which looks like a silvery silo equipped with rocket fins as it sits at SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility in South Texas. The 30-foot-wide, roughly 150-foot-tall prototype — and a similar Mk2 structure taking shape at SpaceX’s site in Florida — are meant to blaze a trail for an even bigger two-stage rocket, with the pointy-ended Starship sitting atop a Super Heavy first-stage booster.

During a live-streamed presentation that’s set for Sept. 28 at the Boca Chica site, Musk is expected to discuss plans for testing and flying the Starship system over the next few years.

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NASA checks out SpaceX’s landing plans for Mars

Starship on Mars
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.

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SpaceX’s Starhopper takes one giant leap

Starhopper fires engine
SpaceX’s Starhopper fires its methane-fueled Raptor engine during a test hop. (Elon Musk via Twitter)

A prototype rocket that looks more like a water tower took a 500-foot-high hop today in Texas, blazing a methane-fueled trail for a spaceship that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk plans to send to the moon and Mars within a few years.

SpaceX’s Starhopper served as a test vehicle for Musk’s Starship launch system – which would consist of a Super Heavy booster with 35 next-generation Raptor engines, plus a Starship craft with six Raptors.

Starship could be used to loft people, cargo or fuel out of Earth orbit and onward to deep space. “One day Starship will land on the rusty sands of Mars,” Musk wrote in a tweet after today’s test.

If Musk’s vision comes to fruition on his current timetable, Starship’s first Mars landing could happen in the mid-2020s. But he had a less ambitious goal for the Starhopper rocket that was tested today.

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SpaceX reports raising a billion dollars

Elon Musk
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk talks about the Starship super-rocket in September 2018. (SpaceX via YouTube)

On the heels of a successful 60-satellite launch, SpaceX says it has raised more than $1 billion for its Starlink satellite internet venture and its super-heavy-lift Starship rocket development effort.

The higher-than-expected investments were reported today in two amended filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. One financing round, which was opened last December, netted $486 million. The other, which opened last month, brought in $535 million. And between the two rounds, there was still $18.8 million in equity to offer, according to the filings.

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Elon Musk shows off Starship on moon and Mars

Starship on moon
An artist’s rendering shows SpaceX’s Starship on the moon. (Elon Musk via Twitter)

New renderings of SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket, shared by CEO Elon Musk on Twitter early today, show the shiny spaceship sitting on bare ground on the moon and Mars.

The artwork is similar to less shiny renderings that came out a couple of years ago when Musk laid out the architecture for the Starship launch system (which was then known as the BFR) at the International Astronautical Congress in Australia.

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SpaceX’s Starhopper takes one small hop

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.

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SpaceX shifts Starship focus from L.A. to Texas

Starship Hopper under construction
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted this picture of a Starship prototype under construction in Texas in December. (Elon Musk via Twitter)

SpaceX says it’ll build and test the prototypes for its next-generation Starship space cruiser and Super Heavy booster in South Texas, despite a deal it struck to build a rocket factory at the Port of Los Angeles.

At least by some accounts, the turnabout is a setback to Los Angeles’ efforts to build a high-tech “Silicon Harbor” at the port, with SpaceX’s planned 18-acre site on Terminal Island as the centerpiece. The Los Angeles City Council approved a 20-year lease agreement with billionaire CEO Elon Musk’s company in May.

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX assembles a shiny Starship

Starship Hopper
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.

Musk tweeted a picture of what looks to be a roughly 120-foot-tall “Starship Hopper,” composed of three sections that were put together at SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility.

“This is an actual picture, not a rendering,” Musk wrote. But the rocket does look eerily like the illustration that Musk shared several days earlier — or, for that matter, the pointy-topped rockets that were all the rage in the 1940s.

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Hello, Starship: SpaceX’s big rocket gets new name

BFR illustration
An artist’s conception shows SpaceX’s newly renamed Starship in flight. (SpaceX Illustration)

First it was the Mars Colonial Transporter, or MCT … then it was the Interplanetary Transport System, or ITS … then it was the Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR. Now it’s Starship.

Tonight SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced the latest name for the spaceship that he says SpaceX aims to use to deliver a million people to Mars, send a Japanese billionaire and an assortment of artists around the moon and back, carry passengers on supersonic trips around the globe, and basically do everything big that needs to be done in space.

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.

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