Fresh off the third launch of the Starship rocket, which was lost after it attempted reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, SpaceX chief Elon Musk now claims that a more advanced future version of the spacecraft will travel into interstellar space.
“This Starship is designed to traverse our entire solar system and beyond to the cloud of objects surrounding us. “A future Starship, much larger and more advanced, will travel to other star systems,” said Musk in a post on
So far, only Voyager 1, Voyager 2, and Pioneer 10 (all NASA spacecraft) have reached interstellar space. Pioneer 11 and New Horizons spacecraft are on trajectories to escape the solar system but they have not yet done it.
During its third test launch last week, the Starship launch system went much further than it did during previous launches and actually managed to put the spacecraft in an intended manner. SpaceX only lost the spacecraft when it tried to reenter Earth’s atmosphere, with it most likely burning up or breaking up over the ocean.
But that is quite the achievement considering two things — First, Starship’s Super Heavy booster rocket (the first stage) is the biggest and most powerful rocket in history. Second, it exploded during both of its previous launches.
Starship is used to refer to both the Super Heavy rocket and Starship spacecraft together. It represents SpaceX’s next-generation rocket system, designed to take humans to orbit, the Moon and beyond. A “human landing system” version of the Starship rocket will play a crucial role in taking Artemis 3 astronauts from lunar orbit to the Moon’s surface and back.
Unlike state-run space agencies like NASA and ISRO, which have a lot of health and safety and other internal regulatory mechanisms to worry about, SpaceX works just like other startups with their “fail fast” and increased policies. Basically, instead of delaying tests and launches by trying to get everything right on the first try, SpaceX is taking an approach where it continuously makes efforts, learning from each failure.
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), a rocket similar in capacity to Starship, has launched just once so far during the Artemis 1 mission in 2022 and its next launch will be during the Artemis 2 mission. SpaceX launched Starship a total of three times since 2023 and is expected to conduct more such launches this year. Part of this contrast can be attributed to how SLS is not reusable unlike its SpaceX counterpart but it also highlights the vastly different approaches followed by the two interdependent space giants.
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