The other half of the SpaceX Starship’s space transport system is beginning to appear.
In the past three months, three life-size prototypes of the 165-foot (50-meter) Starship spacecraft have been launched on high-altitude test flights, each time with impressive but explosive results. However, the company has not introduced any version of the Super Heavy, the 230-foot (70 m) propeller that will launch the Starship off Earth – until now.
“First superheavy booster”, founder and CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk said via Twitter on Thursday afternoon (March 18), where he posted a photo of the big rocket on the company’s website in southern Texas, near the village of Boca Chica on the Gulf Coast.
Booster 1 “is a production pioneer, discovering how to build and transport a 70 meter high stage. Booster 2 will fly,” said Musk in another tweet from Thursday.
Starship and super heavy: SpaceX Mars Colonizing Vehicles in Images
SpaceX is developing Starship and Super Heavy to take people and payloads to the moon, Mars and other distant destinations. Both vehicles will be fully reusable, said Musk. The Super Heavy will return to Earth for a vertical landing shortly after takeoff, as the early stages of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets already do, and the Starship will be able to make many trips to and from Mars or the moon. (The ship will be powerful enough to launch from both bodies, but it needs a Super Heavy to get out of the much more massive Earth.)
Starship and Super Heavy will start flying soon, if everything goes according to Musk’s plan. The billionaire businessman recently said that SpaceX plans to launch the Starship to orbit later this year, and that it predicts that the Starship-Super Heavy duo will be fully operational by 2023.
SpaceX already has a starship mission in the books with an expected launch date of 2023 – the flight “dearMoon” around the closest cosmic neighbor to Earth, which was bought by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.