SpaceX took the Starship spacecraft to the launch pad at Starbase, preparing for its sixth test flight on November 18.
Elon Musk’s company on November 12 brought the 50-meter-high upper stage of Starship to the launch pad at Starbase in South Texas.
Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. The vehicle consists of an upper stage – called Starship, or “Ship” – and a giant first booster stage called Super Heavy. When these two parts are stacked on top of each other, the rocket is nearly 122 meters high – half the size of the Eiffel Tower and weighs about 3,000 tons.
Both stages of the Starship are designed to be completely and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that SpaceX believes will usher in a new era of space travel and exploration.
Starship has flown five times to date, including two times in 2023 (April and November) and three times so far this year (March, June and October).
In the most recent flight on October 13, SpaceX made history when it successfully captured Starship’s Super Heavy booster stage with the launch tower’s “chopsticks” about 7 minutes after takeoff. Then the 50 m high upper stage of the Starship, also known as the Ship, successfully returned to Earth. It landed at a precise point in the Indian Ocean, half a world away from the launch site in South Texas. Elon Musk also plans to retrieve the Starship spacecraft with ‘chopsticks’ in 2025 instead of landing in the sea.
The corporation is trying to repeat this feat in flight 6. Meanwhile, the upper stage will fall into the Indian Ocean, just like in flight 5.
Starship in its 5th test retrieves the thruster stage with a robot arm. Video: SpaceX
Starship is a launch system consisting of the Super Heavy launch vehicle and the Starship spacecraft on top. The booster rocket is located on the first stage and the spacecraft carrying people and cargo is on the second stage. The rocket’s mission is to bring the Starship to a point in orbit, then the Starship will continue flying using its engines while the rocket returns to Earth. Both parts are reusable.
Billionaire Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, believes that such a reusable system will reduce launch costs by $10 million. SpaceX is calculating the cost of carrying a kilogram of cargo into orbit with the new Falcon 9 rocket today to be 2,300 USD while in 1981 it was 147,000 USD, and Starship was 100 USD/kg. According to Musk, this number is very impressive. The reason the price is low is because Starship can provide conveyor-like transport power to low Earth orbit.