you have ever achieved a major feat before, you would know the exhilarating feeling
as you got closer to your goal! Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX, must be in
such a state of euphoria as one of his most audacious projects ever is nearing
completion! Musk’s Starship, the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built, is finally
ready to conquer orbit! How has SpaceX prepared the Starship for this inaugural orbit
flight, and what does it mean for Musk?
In this video, we dive into all the juicy details of SpaceX finally going to orbit!
Elon Musk is among the rare individuals that inhabit the intersection of desiring to go to
Mars and having access to the resources to push the dream through! Backed by the
massive fortune he has acquired as the world’s wealthiest industrialist, Musk remains
dogged in his ambition to make Mars a habitable place for the human race! However,
going to Mars and moving a million people there in a short period requires much more
than desire and resources! It needs lots of brains and foresight. Fortunately, Musk is
well endowed in these aspects as well!
The first step is to arrange the mode of transport. To move a million people over millions
of miles in deep space, lots of factors have to come into play. The biggest one is the
cost! Half a century of mostly theoretical analysis has made it abundantly clear that a
permanent and sustainable extraterrestrial human outpost is impossible without a
radical reduction in the cost of access to space. For decades, even NASA has studied
and studied and studied different plans, but the cost to send a few astronauts to Mars
for a few months at a time has been prohibitive! It would cost the government hundreds
of billions of dollars.
This is where Musk has to play it smart! The first step is to reduce the cost of transport
significantly because, even for the richest man alive, there are limits! This is why
SpaceX is building the Starship, which despite being the most powerful rocket ever, will
reduce the cost of accessing deep space! The trick is to make it reusable, not in part as
SpaceX has been doing before with its Falcon rockets, but entirely in both stages!
This is easier said than done, though, because reusability introduces lots of
complexities due to the capacity it is intended to have!
Which brings us to another factor that Musk needs to work on to make his ambitions a
reality: the Starship must be very powerful! Apart from moving humans, the Starship will
need to move tons of other materials ahead of the colonizers. SpaceX has released
details of how the colonization will take place, and much of it revolves around the
Starship! Here is how things will work out initially for SpaceX to construct sustainable
cities on Mars:
SpaceX will soon commence launching uncrewed Starships to Mars to both verify the
system’s maturity and readiness and deliver significant quantities of cargo to the surface
in advance of human arrival. By using a wide range of robotics, those early missions will
help SpaceX characterize local resources, stage supplies, test technologies for long-
duration Martian surface ops, and begin developing infrastructure – with a propellant
plant likely the most pressing need. This, however, is just baby steps! The early
uncrewed missions will deliver equipment for increased power production, water
extraction, LOX/methane production, pre-prepared landing pads, radiation shielding,
dust control equipment, exterior shelters for humans and equipment, and more! All
these are the hardware needed to support the first human base! Without them, there is
no human base on Mars!
Next is the actual arrival of humans on the planet. SpaceX says for the first few years,
they will live on Starships that brought them until additional habitats are available! This
will then free up the Starships for other uses as needed to support the humans. The
Starships will be valuable assets on the planet as they will be used for storage,
habitation, scientific laboratories, and sources of refined metal structures and resources!
The crazy part of SpaceX’s plan is that the Mars-bound Starships could take off even
before NASA uses the rocket to land its astronauts on the moon! Also, while the space
agency will pay 2.9 billion dollars to SpaceX to use the Starship, Musk says all the
funding for the Starship has been internal and does not even plan to source funds
externally! At least not yet!
For the Starship to be capable of all this, particularly the part where it moves tons of
cargo to prepare the harsh habitat of Mars for human habitation, it has to be powerful
and resilient. And that is what the Starship is! Powered by more than thirty Raptor
engines, the Starship can lift more than 100 tonnes at a time to the earth’s orbit. The
lower stage, or the Super Heavy, will return after separating, and Musk wants it to be
ready for the next flight in about 30 minutes! The upper stage, or the Ship