By Marcia Dunn -
The Associated Press
The space company SpaceX, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, plans to launch this Monday (in a test flight that Musk himself admitted hours before that it could be delayed because "they are going to be very careful") its gigantic ship Starship, the largest rocket and powerful ever built, with the ambitious goal that one day soon it will transport people to the Moon and Mars.
Rising nearly 400 feet (120 meters) into the sky over South Texas, Starship will lift off with the Federal Aviation Administration's blessing, granted Friday, but with no living beings on board.
Starship' on its launch pad in Brownsville, Texas, on April 16, 2023.SPACEX / via REUTERS
It will be the first release with both sections of Starship
.
The first versions of the upper section were launched into the stratosphere a few years ago, crashing several times on their return to Earth before making a successful vertical landing in 2021. The massive rocket booster, dubbed Super Heavy, will be tested for the first time in flight this time.
SpaceX will not try to land the ship: both parts will fall into the sea.
[Musk regains the throne as the
world's richest person]
“I am not saying it will reach orbit, but I guarantee excitement.
It won't be boring," Musk promised last month.
"I think it has, I don't know, hopefully a 50% chance of reaching orbit."
A huge rocket to fly to Mars
The stainless steel Starship has 33 main engines and 16.7 million pounds of thrust.
All but two of the methane-fueled first-stage engines ignited in a launch pad test in January, just enough to reach orbit, Musk said.
Starship could lift up to 250 tons and accommodate 100 people on a trip to Mars.
The six-engine craft is 164 feet (50 meters) tall.
Musk anticipates using Starship to launch satellites, including his Internet service's Starlinks, into orbit before sending a human into space.
The ship dwarfs the rockets in size
Saturn V of the Apollo program, which took humanity to the Moon, and the Space Launch System spacecraft of NASA's Artemis program, which intends to send the first woman to the satellite.
An hour and a half test flight
The test flight will last an hour and a half and will not reach a full orbit of Earth.
If Starship reaches the three-minute mark after launch, the booster will be ordered to break away and fall into the Gulf of Mexico.
The spacecraft would continue east, passing over the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans before splashing down near Hawaii.
Starship is designed to be completely reusable, but not on this test flight.
Harvard astrophysicist and spacecraft analyst Jonathan McDowell said he will be most excited when Starship actually lands and returns intact after orbit.
It will be "a deep development in spaceflight as long as Starship is debugged and operational," he said.
launch pad in texas
Starship will take off from a remote site in the southern tip of Texas, near Boca Chica beach.
It is just below South Padre Island and about 20 miles from Brownsville.
Near the launch pad is the complex where SpaceX has been developing and building Starship prototypes for years.
The complex, called Starbase, has more than 1,800 employees, who live in Brownsville and the Rio Grande Valley.
The launch pad is equipped with giant robotic arms, called chopsticks, so they can retrieve the thrusters when they return to Earth.
SpaceX is renovating one of its two NASA launch pads in Florida to accommodate Starship in the future.
SpaceX's Falcon manned rockets take off from there.
The chances of it going well
As usual, Musk is very frank about his chances, saying there is a 50/50 chance of success on this first flight.
He estimates there is an 80% chance of success that one of the many Starships he is building will reach orbit before the end of the year.
He expects it will take a couple of years to make the rocket fully reusable.
Customers waiting for SpaceX
With Starship, SpaceX is focusing on the Moon for now, with a $3 billion contract with NASA to get astronauts there starting in 2025, using the top section of the spacecraft.
It will be the first moon landing by astronauts in more than 50 years.
They will leave Earth via NASA's Orion capsule powered by the Space Launch System rocket, and then transfer to Starship in lunar orbit for descent to the surface, before returning to Orion.
To get to the Moon and beyond, Starship will first need to refuel in Low Earth Orbit.
To do this, SpaceX will use a fleet of windowless Starships as tankers in space.
The ship will not operate only for NASA: the first crew to fly on it will be private.
First it will only fly over the Earth, and then the Moon but without landing.
Elon Musk's competition
There are other companies that are building their own space rockets.
Billionaire Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is preparing the New Glenn rocket for its orbital debut next year from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Named after the first American to orbit the world, John Glenn, the rocket is larger than the current New Shepard spacecraft, named for astronaut Alan Shepard's 1961 suborbital jump.
NASA will use New Glenn to send a pair of spacecraft to Mars in 2024.
The United Launch Alliance expects its new Vulcan rocket to make its maiden launch later this year, lifting a private lunar lander to the moon at the behest of NASA.
Europe's Arianespace is close to launching its new improved Ariane 6 rocket from French Guiana in South America.
And NASA's Space Launch System rocket, which will transport astronauts to the Moon, will transform into larger versions.