NASA astronauts have just received a tutorial on the spacecraft that could take people to the moon in a few years’ time.
Christina Koch and some of her NASA colleagues recently visited SpaceX’s facilities in southern Texas, where the company is building and testing prototypes for its starship space transport system. The astronauts even took a selfie with the ship’s last iteration, SN11, which could launch on a high altitude test flight this week.
“Common goals, shared vision. NASA astronauts learning about the SpaceX Starship – an element in a growing world field of deeper space exploration systems targeting the Moon and Mars,” Koch wrote on Twitter Tuesday (March 23).
These words served as a caption for the selfie, which shows Koch and fellow astronauts Michael Barratt, Matthew Dominick and Reid Wiseman in front of the stainless steel SN11 (“Serial No. 11”).
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Common goals, shared vision. NASA astronauts learning about the SpaceX Starship – an element in a growing world field of deeper space exploration systems targeting the Moon and Mars. pic.twitter.com/Bwv2hSqzDIMarch 23, 2021
Koch and Dominick are on first picture of 18 astronauts that NASA selected for its Artemis Program, which aims to establish a long-term sustainable human presence on and around the Moon by the end of the 2020s.
The starship could end up being a big part of that effort. The SpaceX system is one of three private concepts that NASA is considering as Artemis’s human landing system. The other two ideas for landing on the moon are being developed by Dynetics and a team led by Jeff Bezos’ space flight company, Blue Origin.
SpaceX spacecraft system it consists of a 50-meter-high spacecraft, known as the Starship, and a giant first-stage booster called the Super Heavy. Both elements are designed to be fully and quickly reusable, and both will be powered by SpaceX’s next generation Raptor engine. The final ship will have six Raptors and the final Super Heavy will have about 30, said SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk.
SN11 features only three Raptors. He will not go into space on his next flight; SpaceX targets a maximum altitude of about 6.2 miles (10 kilometers).
The SN11’s three immediate predecessors also performed this type of flight. All did very well, although none of the ships passed the end-to-end test. SN8 and SN9 – launched in December 2020 and February 2021, respectively – fell to Earth with great force and fell at the landing site. The SN10 landed successfully during the March 3 flight, but was unable to hold on, exploding into a huge fireball about eight minutes later.
These test flights will continue well beyond the SN11. Musk said that SpaceX plans to place a prototype starship in Earth orbit this year, and he predicts that the system will be fully operational by 2023. There is already a starship mission provisionally scheduled to launch that year – “dearMoon”, a flight around the moon reserved 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.