Employees of SpaceX will not leave their hands empty, although they have achieved significant results over a week ago being the first private company to shoot humans into space. Now, the development of the Starship spacecraft will be prioritized at the company. Therefore, the astronaut is intended to transport up to a hundred people and supplies to the moon and Mars.
Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, recently sent a message (published on CNBC ) to the company’s employees, stating that Starship is now a priority, apart from the work involved in bringing the two spacecraft back to Earth.
He urged employees to spend time in Texas, building prototypes of Starship, and even moving there.
On Saturday, the Crew Dragon astronaut named Endeavor was launched on the Florida Falcon 9 rocket SpaceX. Onboard were astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken and are now aboard the International Space Station.
In addition to being the first time a private company sends humans into space, this was the first time humans have been launched from the United States since 2011 when the space shuttles were taken out of service.
SpaceX has not gone so well with the development of Starship and at least four prototypes have sprung up. The last one, which exploded on May 29, was much further in the development process than previous prototypes.
The company has made a special mark by developing reliable rockets that carry cargo on the ground, turn around and land again. Then the rockets can be re-used with another spacecraft, as SpaceX has done many times.
Thus, SpaceX has managed to perform spacecraft at a much lower cost than other companies and organizations, where rockets are often ignited in the atmosphere and/or crash into the ocean.
Starship launches with SpaceX’s Super Heavy Rocket. The rocket is about to return to Earth and Starship can then continue into space. SpaceX’s goal is to develop the world’s most powerful rocket and starship capable of reaching more than a hundred tons of Earth, which is very large.
This is evidenced by the carrying capacity of Ariane 5 missiles developed by Airbus for the European Space Agency, ESA, over twenty tons. However, this is only the case when low cargo is being loaded. To bring cargo to the moon or to Mars, much more carrying capacity is needed.
SpaceX executives also want to use Starship to ferry people and stores around the Earth. To make a device, it will take less time to travel from New Delhi to Washington by space shuttle than by airplane. In short, Elon Musk wants to make a rocket an airplane. The only thing that needs to be done between flights is to inject fuel on the rocket.
However, these “aircraft” should also be able to move people into the solar system.
SpaceX employees are likely to have a lot to do in the coming years with the development of Starship, especially considering that NASA Scientific Institute has selected Starship as one of three landings under consideration for returning humans to the moon in 2024.
It is proposed to use one of three journeys to ferry astronauts from a spacecraft based on the orbit of the moon, called the Lunar Gateway, to the surface of the moon.
