On Thursday, SpaceX completed the assembly of their Starship Mk 1 prototype. The massive vehicle represents the company’s next step toward building the combination of Starship and SuperHeavy booster that is intended to be their reusable craft for missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
One of the world’s largest mobile cranes come on to the scene at SpaceX’s Boca Chica, TX location this week, helping to stack what had been three separate pieces of the massive ship into one stainless steel tower. Looking uncannily like the idea of a spaceship lifted from a 1950’s magazine, SpaceX made the decision to go to stainless steel rather than what might be seen as a more modern material like composites and carbon fiber after determining that steel’s ability to handle repeated stresses and maintain strength in both very cold and very hot conditions gave it an edge.
In August, SpaceX’s earlier “Star Hopper” test vehicle made a short test flight using one of the new Raptor engines that run on methane and oxygen. The Starship Mk1 has three Raptor engines. It’s expected that the final, orbital version of Starship will have six. The SuperHeavy booster may carry as many as thirty of the powerful engines, giving it a lift capacity far greater than NASA’s famous Saturn V.
Over the last several years, SpaceX’s plans for Starship and its whole interplanetary launch system have gone through multiple redesigns. That’s a characteristic of the company, which has iterated through changes rapidly. The workhorse Falcon 9 booster, which has made SpaceX the most formidable company in the launch business, has gone through dozens of configurations and modifications before arriving at the current “Block 5” design.
On Saturday evening, SpaceX founder Elon Musk will give a presentation from the Boca Chica site. At that presentation he is expected to unveil the latest changes to the Starship design—which is already very different that the one he presented just a year ago—as well as an update on SpaceX’s plans and schedule.
Livestream of event begins at 7:00PM Central Time