If future humanity looks back at this moment, it will see towering starships in the wasteland of Texas like lighthouses, reflecting signals that will change their destiny.
Here comes the strongest, most efficient, and most economical starship system ever built.
This is also after the first starship launch in 2019, Musk officially held a new launch conference for SpaceX, and he shared the latest progress of the starship and the exciting future it brings.
These starships will take us to the moon, Mars, and those out of reach beyond the solar system.
It sounds great, but Musk describes the process this way:
We seem to see demons knocking at the door.
The strongest starship system + the latest space program
Since the unveiling of SpaceX's starship in 2019, the praise and controversy have never stopped.
Musk concluded that SpaceX has achieved 144 successful launches and 106 successful landings in the past two years.
The number of times I have launched PTSDs, and I have to go to see what netizens say after each launch.
In the past two years, Musk has not explicitly mentioned the information of the starship update, but the practice is non-stop.
The starships displayed today are also very different from the earliest appearances.
Reusable starships
The latest starship is 50 meters tall, 9 meters in diameter, and 120 meters in diameter with rocket boosters.
It has a payload of 100-150 tons and can carry 200 tons of propellant into orbit to refuel other starships in space, which is also the necessary process for traveling to Mars.
Its surface is covered with insulating tiles, which are expensive, and Musk mentioned that the team completed the reusable tiles at a low price, with the guarantee that performance would not be compromised.
The most important thing is that it can be reused, and it is also applied to the entire starship system.
SpaceX will use a robotic arm that looks like a "chopstick" to recover the rocket booster in the launch tower.
Although the booster is large, it can theoretically fly once an hour and return to space within 6 minutes.
This allows the tower to be launched and recycled quickly, refurbished and reused with old equipment, and the ship can be launched again every 6-8 hours, with Starship originally designed to fly 3 times a day.
Their goal is to create at least one stack every month, which is a combination of spacecraft and rockets.
Eventually, a spaceship was built every 3 days.
It's a rewrite of the rules for the entire space industry, and it dramatically reduces the cost of aerospace materials manufacturing, wasted equipment, and increasingly crisis of space junk.
Super heavy rocket engine
Speaking of SpaceX's rockets, Musk said that the current super heavy rocket is 69 meters high and will be the strongest and most efficient rocket ever built.
It will have twice the thrust of the largest launch vehicle, Saturn 5. Is Saturn 5 familiar? It's the rocket NASA sent humans to the moon.
The engine of this super heavy rocket has also been recently developed - the Raptor v1 engine on the left and the Raptor v2 engine on the right.
As you can see, with a thrust of more than 100 tons and a thrust of 230 tons, the old raptor looks like a Christmas tree, and the new raptor is more concise and has more thrust.
In the future, its thrust will increase to 250 tons, Musk bluntly said, the most time he has spent recently is the Raptor and Tesla's autopilot.
Musk said SpaceX can build an average of 1 Raptor Raptor engine per day.
In this way, the cost of building each starship is several million dollars, and the cost per launch will be less than $10 million.
Follow-up space mission scheduling
The launch plan in 2022 is undoubtedly the topic that everyone is most concerned about.
Musk said that this year, SpaceX plans to carry out about 50 launches, about 1 per week, and hopes to make technology iterations every month.
Regulatoryly, SpaceX will build a second starship launch site in Florida. They have already obtained environmental permits, which the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is likely to approve in March.
When asked when Starship's first orbital flight test would be conducted, Musk said:
I'm very confident that I'll be able to put it on track this year.
In terms of economic benefits, Musk has greater expectations for SpaceX, and it mentioned that it previously felt that space exploration was too expensive, mainly because it was not recyclable:
Over time, SpaceX could produce 100 times the output.
The dream of building a Martian city
The starship was originally built primarily for humans to colonize Mars.
At the press conference, Musk also mentioned the vision of going to Mars on a starship -
The "starship" can transport a large number of supplies, create a self-sufficient "Mars city" on Mars, and gradually break away from the supply of the parent star (Earth).
Self-sufficiency is the hardest to achieve, the reusability of equipment is key, and Mars, although much like Earth, is still a vicious wilderness, Musk laughed and introduced their journey to Mars:
The biggest selling point of this space trip is that it's very hard, it's very tough, and it's very easy to die.
He added that although it is difficult, SpaceX will complete the project of building a Martian city as soon as possible.
In the promotional video for the journey to Mars, the thrusters help the starship lift off and then return to Earth to recycle and reuse, and the starships are interconnected in space.
After they landed on the Martian base, in this barren and cold land, people were wearing silver aviation equipment and looking at their harvest.
Behind the seemingly crazy starship program, many people have an appreciation for Musk's courage on the one hand, and on the other hand, jokes and criticisms are endless.
How to make these hopes land, SpaceX's actual actions, in fact, deserve our attention.
A Brief History of Musk's Starship: Constantly exploding, constantly rising
Exploded again?
This may be the most commented by netizens on the starship in the past two years.
From July 26, 2019, the first starship prototype "starhopper" was launched, starting a 20-meter free suspension test.
After that, the higher the altitude, the more explosions there were.
MK1, SN1, SN3, SN4, SN7, SN7, SN8, SN9, SN10, SN11, SpaceX blew up a total of 10 starships.
Some of them fail because of the pressurization test, some because of the failure of welding technology, some because of the failure of the low temperature test of the fuel tank, some because of the failure of the test of filling liquid nitrogen, some because of the sudden explosion after static ignition, some of them explode on the ground, and some even explode in situ after successful landing...
The SN11 suddenly paused during the live flight, the camera signal was lost, and the voice of the commentator came:
SN11 won't be back, no need to wait for it to land.
In the midst of bursts and bright flames, SpaceX took every step of the way.
People joked that this was "a starship with flowing water, an iron cannonball."
However, Musk is still quite optimistic, after the SN8 hit the ground and exploded, Musk tweeted happily, "We have all the data we need, congratulations to the SpaceX team!"
Commentators watched countless fragments of the starship falling from the sky as SN11 exploded, and Musk said it was a successful failure, "at least the pit that hit out was in the right place."
In his opinion, "efficient production efficiency can solve many problems."
Indeed, few airlines can launch once a month like he does.
When people complained about the starship's cheap stainless steel shell, but behind it was the SpaceX team's efficient and mass production of the rocket — the SN11 arrived at the launch pad just a week after the SN10 was launched.
At the same time, each blower has made up for the previous deficiencies, and hundreds of technologies such as fuel, thrust, engine, fuselage, and landing are constantly improving.
The speed of this progress is proportional to the frequency of emission, and the probability of success is getting higher and higher.
After SN11, Musk directly replaced the previous version and jumped to the new SN15 -
On the day of launch, 3 "Raptor" engines advanced and climbed, and after 10 kilometers of air shutdown, the SN15 adjusted its attitude and began to land, and finally landed successfully, and cheers sounded.
At this point, SpaceX has finally gained the most difficult safe landing capability.
Today, the latest starship is in front of us, and the ultimate version is more and more within reach.
Before everyone gets on the "starship"
In Musk's journey to Mars, the starship system is at the heart.
SpaceX estimates that the final starship spacecraft will require about 20 prototypes to test.
Now that SN21 and SN22 are nearing completion, it's worth noting that starchains have been installed on starships since SN15.
In addition to SpaceX's well-known Falcon rockets and manned Dragon spacecraft, the Starlink program is another important task of SpaceX.
It has sparked a lot of heat since its inception, and Musk hopes to eventually launch 42,000 satellites, establish a global satellite network, provide broadband services for users on the earth, and make it easy to access the Internet even inaccessible places.
Starship + Starlink also heralds the combination of wireless communication + space transportation, and the Starlink Internet will be spread throughout every place in the space journey.
Although the recent turmoil around Musk has been continuous, NASA has expressed concern about the deployment of tens of thousands of satellites in the Starlink plan, believing that it may increase the probability of space collisions, and the recent solar radiation explosion has also caused more than 40 SpaceX satellites to be scrapped.
As a figure in the topic storm, Musk was recently elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering, which caused a wave of controversy.
But putting aside Musk's own aura, we still have the greatest expectations for space exploration, expecting future generations to live well before the worst outcome on Earth arrives.
From NASA to major private space companies, the space circuit has become more and more intense.
Aerospace industry consultancy NSR expects the suborbital market to be worth $2.8 billion by 2028 and $10.4 billion in total revenue over the next decade; the orbital market at $610 million and $3.6 billion over the next decade.
NASA, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin... Behind the attention of these space companies is the expectation, there is also the cynicism, behind the competition, everything is moving forward fast.
Musk has mentioned that Space X's future plans are as follows :
Launch at least two cargo ships to Mars in 2022 to provide energy, mining technology and life support systems for future spacecraft.
Plans to land on Mars with astronauts will be completed in 2024 and 1 million people will be sent to Mars in nine years by 2050.
In the future, 1,000 starships will be launched to Mars every year, an average of 3 times a day, and a starship will sit 100 people, and they will all become new Martian inhabitants.
Polarized skepticism and pursuit will continue, and it is always good to actively explore when conditions permit.
Musk's statement this time seems to be much more solid:
Regarding exploring the Milky Way, we are free to choose to go and not to go, but I think we should all have the possibility of going.
It's like having only a small wave of people going to the moon — if they go, they're going to be human.
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