For Mars, today could be the night on the eve of a sea change.
At the Boca Chica Starship Base in Texas, SpaceX founder Musk, standing in front of the 119-meter-high starship combination B4+S20, clenched his fists with both hands, raised his arms and shouted, and made the strongest voice of mankind to date: Let's make this all a reality! （Let’s make this real！ ）
Immediately the audience applauded thunderously, and the cheers lasted for a long time, which made the starship launch into a small climax. However, for human civilization, the significance of this conference may be far from the cheers of the hundreds of people present at the meeting, which may be a foot that humanity is stretching out, ready to take the first step towards interstellar civilization.
Compared with the annual mobile phone launches of tech giants such as Apple, Google, and Samsung, SpaceX's starship launch seems to be too long apart, which is the second starship conference held by the company after the first conference in 2019.
But it seems understandable that smartphones are mature products, and the conference is just an iterative update; while the starship is from 0 to 1, it needs to be made out of nothing, giving birth to a completely new field that has never been seen before on Earth - the logistics system of the solar system.
At the same time, SpaceX released several videos in a row:
The launch tower at the starship base will help stack the starship and catch the superweight booster – showing the process of the tower hoisting the starship onto the booster and clamping the returning booster with a robotic arm;
The Raptor 2nd Generation rocket produces more than 230 tons of thrust at sea level, higher than the 185 tons of The Raptor 1st Generation, which will eventually reach 250 tons and reduce the cost by half - which will directly lead to the starship being more powerful, safer and easier to control;
A fully and rapidly reusable launch vehicle is the key to future human exploration of the solar system — the process by which a starship takes off from Earth, refuels in orbit, flies to Mars, and lands in a Martian city.
In his speech, Musk revealed the latest news and details of the starship system, including:
The starship superweight booster will be equipped with 33 Raptor 2nd generation rocket engines, up to 69 meters high, 9 meters in diameter, 3400 tons of propellant, producing 7590 tons of thrust, twice the size of the Saturn V, and will be the largest rocket ever built on Earth;
The landing method of the superweight booster was changed to be captured in the air by a pair of huge robotic arms, like Chinese chopsticks, which were clamped and gently placed on the launch pad, and could be re-launched after an hour;
The starship will be equipped with 6 Raptor engines, which may eventually be increased to 9, with a height of 50 meters, a diameter of 9 meters, can be filled with 1200 tons of propellant, generating 1500 tons of thrust, and the payload is 100 tons to 150 tons;
Raptor engines can reach a capacity of 1 per day next month, which means that a superweight booster can be produced in about 1 month, and eventually one starship every three days - starships must be more than boosters, because the boosters only need 2 minutes to rise, return 4 minutes, refuel for 30 minutes, and launch again in an hour; and starships have to circle the earth at least once (90 minutes), or three or four laps to land, and it takes 6-8 hours to relaunch;
The total mass that humans have sent into space in 70 years is about 15,000 tons, and a future starship will be able to launch all of these masses into space in a year. While building a self-sufficient, self-sustaining city on Mars would require transporting 1 million tons of supplies from Earth in the past, the starship will have the ability to do just that;
Musk also stressed that the starship's point-to-point flight on Earth is very important, helping to maintain the rhythm of SpaceX's rapid launch and reduce the marginal cost of the starship: the cost of launching a 100-ton payload into Earth orbit in two or three years may be less than $10 million, and eventually as low as $1 million at a time.
Musk also talked about the biggest problem facing him now, which is the melting of the combustion chamber of the Raptor engine, but it may be solved soon; the other is that if NASA (FAA) gives a negative environmental impact assessment result and does not approve the launch in Texas, Musk is optimistic that the FAA will approve, even if the worst happens, SpaceX can transfer the launch base to the Kennedy Space Center and rebuild a launch pad, but the time may be delayed by 6 to 8 months.
Based on the huge success of the Falcon 9 rocket, the success of Musk and SpaceX's starships may only be a matter of time; and once it is really possible to build starships in batches like Boeing and Airbus, humans will fly to Mars on a large scale and build Martian cities will become more and more realistic.
For the first time in 4.5 billion years, single-celled life born from that small pond on Earth has finally evolved to be able to go out of Earth and build its own home on another planet. Mars, or it is close at hand, is on the eve of great change!
Perhaps as Musk said at the beginning of his speech, there may always be some disasters on the earth, such as dinosaurs are no longer there, for people who really care about the earth, care about the environment, care about humans, care about life, become multi-planetary life is very important. We are the guardians of life, and the life we love won't build spaceships, but we can, so we want to go out and become multi-planet species, become a space-based agricultural civilization, create a science fiction civilization, and not let science fiction always be fiction.
With the rapid development of civilization and technology, in modern society, the ideal is no longer the epitaph of the ideal, the noble is no longer the epitaph of the noble, the ideal and the noble is the laser that cleanses all the smog and conspiracy, leading mankind to an unprecedented place!