Musk says ‘Mars is looking real’
SpaceX launches Starship prototype on short flight
A giant steel can with Mars aspirations made a successful liftoff and landing as SpaceX performed a short hop flight test of its latest Starship prototype on Tuesday.
SpaceX posted video of the test rocket dubbed SN5, as in serial number 5, as it performed a 150 meter hop flight from its Boca Chica, Texas, test site. The 40-second flight shows the stubby metal cylinder take off from a test pad using one of the company’s Raptor engines, fly up and then stick the landing.
“Mars is looking real,” reads one of several posts on Elon Musk’s Twitter account after the flight.
Starship is the model SpaceX plans for both suborbital pointto-point flights around Earth as well as deep space missions to the moon and Mars. The full version will feature six Raptor engines, stand about 165 feet tall and have a 100-passenger capacity.
The large version of Starship would be coupled with a Super Heavy booster with 37 Raptor engines combined for Mars colonization plans. Musk recently said company plans are to still have an uncrewed mission to Mars by 2022 and the first humans to Mars by 2024.
The short hop, though, is something SpaceX had already achieved on a previous test version of Starship in 2019, but SpaceX has changed up designs since then, and have been moving quickly through new iterations of the stainless steel behemoths, some resulting in explosions on the launch pad, like prototype SN4 in June.
The next step with this prototype is more test flights at higher and higher altitudes.
“We’ll do several short hops to smooth out launch process, then go high altitude with body flaps,” Musk tweeted.
He also said other future launches will feature a Starship with longer legs, and then a version that will be “wider & taller — like Falcon, but capable of landing on unimproved surfaces & autoleveling.”
NASA recently awarded SpaceX among other companies to develop Starship as an option for lunar landings as part of its Artemis program.
Starship is the company’s eventual replacement for its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.
At one point, SpaceX was developing a prototype of Starship at its Cape Canaveral facility as well, but shut that program down to focus all efforts in Texas. SpaceX will continue to consider Kennedy Space Center’s Pad 39A for deep-space launches in addition to pursuing the potential of using the offshore option or a launch facility at Boca Chica, Musk recently stated.
For suborbital point-to-point flights, Musk said he expects the first test flights in 2022 or 2023.
Musk has hinted at a major Starship plan update coming in September. Last September, Musk spoke to a crowd of SpaceX employees from Texas with aspirations to have already achieved an orbital test flight and be gearing up for the first humans on board, but that version of Starship gave way to this current model.
Back then, he said the next big step would have been a 20 km or 65,000-foot test flight.
“That’s going to be pretty epic seeing that thing take off and come back,” he said in 2019.