In a matter of days, the world could see the launch and first-ever orbital flight test of Elon Musk’s massive Starship.
According to a Tweet by SpaceX founder Elon Musk on Wednesday, SpaceX stacked its latest Starship vehicle on the orbital launch mount at Starbase in South Texas.
Wednesday’s stacking was prep work for the first-ever orbital flight test for Starship, as Musk noted in his tweet: “Starship preparing for launch,” he wrote as a sort of caption for the 47-second video. according to Space.com.
SpaceX’s Super Heavy rocket, a prototype known as Starship 24 and measuring 120 meters tall by 9m wide (394ft by 30ft), is currently being prepared for its maiden orbital launch aboard a Super Heavy Booster 7 prototype.
Amid reports that a blast-off date of around Easter Monday could be on the cards for the two-stage rocket, Musk tweeted a video of the preparations at its facility in Boca Chica, Texas.
Both of Starship’s stages are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that Musk thinks will make Mars colonization and a variety of other bold spaceflight feats economically feasible. SpaceX will attempt to land the Super Heavy booster in Texas near the launch site.
In February, the company completed a mostly successful test ignition of its 33 engines, with 31 igniting as planned in what was the most powerful static fire test in history.
One of the biggest delays to the launch was on environmental grounds, but last year the US Federal Aviation Administration approved the lift-off.
According to SpaceX, the reusable rocket will be capable of lifting more than 100 tons into higher geostationary orbit, compared with its current Falcon Heavy’s maximum of 70 tons. Musk claims the heavier rocket will allow a potential sixfold reduction in the cost of sending objects into space.
Starship’s maximum 150-ton capacity for low-Earth orbit casts much shade over the next largest in the pipeline, the 45-ton from New Glenn, which is being built by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, not to mention the rockets being developed by Lockheed Martin and Boeing’s United Launch Alliance and the Ariane 6 from European contender Arianespace, which are both smaller.