Following SpaceX’s first successful landing of its Starship test vehicle and the award of a NASA contract for a lunar lander based on Starship, it’s looking increasingly likely that a Starship will reach orbit in 2021. When launched on its booster stage ‘Super Heavy’, it will become the largest launch vehicle yet, capable of placing up to 150 tonnes into orbit. But once it has done that it will have exhausted its propellants, and the driving purpose of Starship, and indeed SpaceX itself, is to provide cost-effective transport to Mars.
The first challenge was to dramatically reduce the cost of reaching space, and SpaceX set about this by developing reusable rockets – initially the Falcon 9, and now Starship. As Musk has commented, if a jet airliner was used for a single transatlantic flight before being thrown away, flights would be impractically expensive. Recovering the expensive stages and using them again was the key to getting into space cheaply enough to ship a lot of cargo and passengers to Mars. Starship will make that cheaper still, but the next challenge is to refill craft in space so they can actually go somewhere else.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der Issue 119-Ausgabe von All About Space.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent ? Anmelden
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der Issue 119-Ausgabe von All About Space.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent? Anmelden
"We knew that this would be a historic comet"
Astronomer David Levy was immortalised for his co-discovery of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 – its impact with Jupiter 29 years ago held the world in awe
CELESTRON STARSENSE EXPLORER DX 102AZ
Innovative technology provides the simplest and quickest solution yet to finding objects to observe, and this instrument will be very popular with beginners
MOON TOUR - COPERNICUS
Get up close to the ‘Monarch of the Moon’
A HUNGRY BLACK HOLE 'SWITCHES ON' AS ASTRONOMERS WATCH IN SURPRISE
J221951 is one of the most extreme examples yet
MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE - WHY DOES JUPITER CHANGE COLOUR?
For years, scientists have tried to work out why Jupiter’s bands frequently move and change colour. Now they believe they’ve found the answer
MARS HELICOPTER PHONES HOME AFTER A 63-DAY SILENCE
Rugged terrain had kept Ingenuity from communicating with its robotic partner, the Perseverance rover
SIX OF THE BEST SPACE PRANKS
It turns out that the sky isn’t the limit when it comes to a good old-fashioned practical joke
CLIMATES CHANGE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Alongside Earth, our planetary neighbourhood is changing. But not for the better…
TIME APPEARED TO MOVE FIVE TIMES SLOWER IN THE FIRST BILLION YEARS AFTER THE BIG BANG
Time dilation, brought about by the relativistic expansion of space, has resulted in the observed slowing of ‘clocks’ in the early universe
WHAT CAN WE DO WITH A CAPTURED ASTEROID?
Asteroids could provide us with rare resources