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A new photo shows how big SpaceX is Spaceship Mars colonizing vehicle will be.
Founder and CEO of SpaceX Elon musk He tweeted an image Sunday (May 3) looking at the belly of Starship’s latest prototype, the SN4, which is on the test bench at the company’s South Texas site. The image shows the SN4’s only Raptor engine, which looks extremely lonely in the center of a 30-foot-wide (9-meter) span.
“SN4 fires soon. Raptor looks so small,” Musk wrote in the tweet.
Related: SpaceX spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket in pictures
SN4 🔥 soon. Raptor looks so small. pic.twitter.com/WcMdo6wAtjMay 4, 2020
As Musk noted, the Raptor will soon exercise, in the form of a “static fire” test, during which the engine will burn while the rocket is tied up. In fact, SpaceX was aiming to test the engine on Sunday night, but suspended it because the Raptor’s liquid methane propeller got too hot, Musk explained in a statement. another tweet. The next attempt will come soon, probably sometime today (May 4).
If the static fire goes well, SpaceX will begin preparing for an unmanned test flight with the SN4, taking the prototype about 500 feet (150 m) into the skies of South Texas.
Future prototypes will go much higher. For example, the SN5 will have three Raptors, and SpaceX wants to send that vehicle about 12 miles (20 kilometers), Musk said.
The final ship will be even more powerful, with six engines. The 50-meter-tall, 50-passenger, 100-passenger spacecraft will be able to lift off from the surface of the moon and Mars, Musk said.
But Starship will need help to break free of the gravitational control of our planet. Thus, it will launch from Earth on a giant rocket called Super Heavy, which will be powered by dozens of Raptors. (In previous designs, Super Heavy could boast 37 engines. But Musk recently tweeted that the rocket will be powered by “only” 31 Raptors).
Both Super Heavy and Starship will be fully reusable, potentially reducing the cost of spaceflight enough to allow colonization of Mars, Musk said. And the Red Planet is not the couple’s sole exploration objective; The moon is also at stake. For example, NASA only awarded a contract to SpaceX to develop Starship as a lunar lander, to transport astronauts to the surface of the moon for the agency’s Artemis program, which aims to land humans in 2024.
Two other industry groups have won similar human landing contracts: Alabama-based Dynetics and a team led by Blue Origin, the space flight company led by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. Not all privately developed landers will end up flying NASA astronauts; the agency will evaluate the designs and decide which ones to continue funding. Ultimately, NASA will choose among the vehicles that arrive on operational flights and purchase landing missions as transportation services.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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