Absolute units
A new image shared by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shows Thursday that two prototype spacecraft tanks are being assembled “in the city center.”
Two spaceship tanks in the midbay pic.twitter.com/QJ2V882WOC
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 25, 2020
At first, it may look like a couple of your average hot water tanks, but if you zoom in, you can see individual engineers working on the welds on top of the two monstrosities. They are absolutely giants, and they are just the tanks of the spaceship.
Twitter user Matthew Wilkes was impressed. “These things are like skyscrapers bound for space,” he joked.
Extremely high
SpaceX imagines that its final spacecraft spacecraft will be 160 feet tall, without the brace, and a whopping 30 feet in diameter. With the boost, the rocket will rise to about 400 feet, nearly 100 feet higher than the Statue of Liberty, including its base.
“This will take off, fly at 65,000 feet – about 20 kilometers – and return and land in about a month or two,” Musk said at the spacecraft launch event in September 2019 (that test has not yet happened). “So that giant thing, it’s really going to be pretty epic to see that thing take off and come back.”
Booster seat
SpaceX’s individual Raptor rocket engines for the spacecraft alone are over ten feet tall and four feet in diameter.
There is a good reason for that. SpaceX wants to fit up to 100 passengers, or 100 tons of cargo, into the spacecraft for trips to the Moon and even Mars.
The news comes after SpaceX intentionally exploited a prototype Starship tank named SN7 at its test site in Boca Chica, Texas, earlier this week.
A test of the SN7 Starship tank last week did not result in an explosion, something Musk called a “good result” on June 15.
READ MORE: Elon Musk Shares An Impressive Image Showing Tank’s Real Size[[[[Reverse]
More about the spacecraft: SpaceX explodes another spaceship tank, this time on purpose
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