Three years ago, the notion of landing and re-flying a large rocket multiple times seemed distant. And then, in early 2018, the company launched the Falcon Heavy with 27 engines. Three years ago, the idea of flying 37 engines on a single rocket seemed fanciful. Standing in a field in South Texas on Saturday night, it felt a little more like science and a little less like fiction. But mostly the vision seemed like science fiction. He spoke of building a large, interplanetary spaceship-it was not yet named Starship- and a large rocket booster with dozens of engines that would carry 100 people to Mars at a time.Īt the time, it seemed audacious, mad, and brilliant, all at the same time.
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Three years ago, Elon Musk took the stage in Guadalajara, Mexico, to share the full scope of his Mars ambitions for the first time.
In the moment, Mars seemed a little closer than it had before. "This is the most inspiring thing that I have ever seen," said Musk, dressed in a black blazer, t-shirt, and jeans, of the towering spaceship. As night fell and Musk climbed onto a small dais, it rose tall, dark, and imposing. Earlier, as the Sun dipped below the horizon, reddish hues glinted off the Starship's surface. The prototype loomed behind Musk as he addressed a crowd of a few hundred people, including employees, local residents from Brownsville and surrounding towns, and members of the media. Mere hours after a team of SpaceX engineers, technicians, and contractors completed assembly of a prototype of the Starship vehicle, Musk revealed it to the world. He did so in an open-air shipyard by the Rio Grande River, where he intends to build dozens if not hundreds of Starship spacecraft. He believes the exploration of space, and human expansion into the Solar System, provides this kind of a hopeful vision.Īnd so, beneath a big Texas sky full of stars, he offered hope in the form of a large spaceship. But it is also important to give people hope for the future and a sense of optimism. Musk acknowledged that there are a lot of problems here on Earth, and it is important for those to get fixed. And that's good news for investors banking on taxpayer funds continuing to flow through the SLS project and its contractors.BOCA CHICA BEACH, Texas-Elon Musk spoke about his vision of a brighter future for humanity on Saturday evening in South Texas. What it means for investorsĪs a result, right now it seems there's a good chance SLS will beat Starship to orbit - beat it to the moon, in fact, considering that that's where Artemis I is headed. Many space pundits are therefore suggesting that because of all the environmental hoops SpaceX must jump through, an August or September launch is more likely - for both SLS and Starship.
In that case, it won't really be SpaceX's fault - but the FAA's - if launch doesn't happen until August or even September. But that doesn't mean SpaceX itself is promising to have checked every box on the FAA's checklist for getting its spaceport ready to support those flights. Starship will be ready to fly in July - perhaps even two separate Starships. We will have a second Starship stack ready to fly in August and then monthly thereafterīut notice the details.
If all goes well, the Artemis I mission will also confirm SLS's status as the biggest, most powerful operational space rocket on Earth. This SLS launch, dubbed Artemis I, will send the rocket on a three-week-long looping path out past the moon and then back to Earth, where its unmanned Orion crew module will splash down in the ocean. So this is a goal, rather than a deadline.
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After repeated delays that have pushed the project way behind schedule ( and over budget to boot), NASA has confirmed that SLS is finally approaching the finish line.Īfter a partially successful pre-launch fueling test on June 20, NASA Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Jim Free told Ars Technica the space agency is "targeting" a first launch date in late August or early September. When NASA first announced the SLS project in 2010, it set an ambitious schedule for development that assumed a first flight as early as 2016 - but obviously, that didn't happen.
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