Elon Musk has a giant new addition to
his plans for colonizing Mars the
starship rocket for years this rocket
was merely a concept on paper but not
anymore
on Saturday September 28th musk stood in
front of a fully assembled prototype of
the rocket as he unveiled SpaceX's
future plans which future do you want do
you want the future where we've become a
spacefaring civilization and are in many
worlds and now out there among the stars
or one where we are forever confined to
earth and I say it is the first if all
goes according to plan when starship is
complete it will tower three hundred and
eighty seven feet tall measure thirty
feet in diameter and be capable of
transporting people to Mars for
comparison it will be about five and a
half times taller than SpaceX is first
successful rocket the Falcon one
starship is the rocket that musk has
aspired to build ever since he founded
SpaceX in 2002 and after years of
modeling multiple changes to the Rockets
design and a substantial investment from
Japanese billionaire yuusaku Misawa it
has come out looking on like anything
SpaceX has ever built before for example
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket are covered by
an aluminum lithium alloy but as you can
see starship is covered with something
different which must call the best
design decision of the entire project
steel is the best design decision on
this whole thing is a 301 stainless
steel because at cryogenic temperatures
a 301 stainless actually has about the
same effective strength as an advanced
composite or aluminum lithium
unlike most Steel's which get brittle at
low temperature 301 stainless gets much
stronger and unlike the nine engines on
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket s-- starship
will fly on six more powerful Raptor
engines the ship will have a total of
six engines three of the c-level variety
of raptor and those are actually on the
rocket right now in fact that's a
picture of just inside that's good
that's what it looks like and they take
gimbal which is which means that the
whole engine moves so the way the rocket
steers is by moving the entire
engine so whereas an aircraft engine is
static and you move by moving like the
control surfaces like the airlock
ailerons and rudder and elevator and
flaps with the rocketship when the
engines are powered you move the entire
engine to steer it the starship will
have three c-level engines that move up
to about 15 degrees angle and three
vacuum engines that are optimized for
efficiency that will not move they'll be
just fixed in place musk said that
within the next one to two months SpaceX
will launch this starship prototype
called Mach one to twelve and a half
miles in the air and then land it back
home in Boca Chica Texas after that our
next flight after that might actually
just be all the way to orbit with a
booster and the ship the prototype shown
here will probably never reach orbit
that mission will go to an upgraded
version of the rocket called Mach 3
which SpaceX could start constructing as
soon as next month and by next year musk
says space X could be launching people
to space on this thing whether that's
actually the case we'll just have to
wait and see in the meantime musk
remains optimistic to Mars