Elon Musk wants his new rocket to revolutionise spaceflight. And that rocket, Starship, is now the largest and most powerful spacecraft ever built. It’s also designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. His private company SpaceX, which is behind the creation, is hoping to develop a spaceship that can be used more like a plane than a traditional rocket system, being able to land, refuel and take off again a few hours after landing.
Starship is a two-stage vehicle. The “Ship” is the uppermost part, and that sits atop a booster called Super Heavy. Thirty-three engines at the base of this booster produce around 74 meganewtons of thrust. To put that into perspective, it’s almost 700 times as powerful as the thrust generated by the common passenger plane, the Airbus A320neo. If you’ve flown with Aer Lingus, British Airways or Lufthansa, imagine the kick of taking off in one of those planes. Then multiply that by 700.
It’s also about twice as powerful as the Saturn V rocket that sent astronauts to the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s. Starship is about 120m tall and has a diameter of around 9m. The fins sticking out from the booster help steer it back to Earth.
There are a few things Starship could be used for soon. So far Musk has used his own rockets, like the Falcon 9 series, to launch his own commercial satellites, known as Starlink. NASA also wants to use Starship as part of its Artemis programme, which aims to establish a long-term human presence on the Moon. In the more distant future, Musk wants Starship to make long-haul trips to Mars and back – about a nine month trip each way.
In the meantime, Starship has also been built to carry heavy loads needed to build space stations, and eventually, infrastructure for a human presence on the Moon.
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