SpaceX Starship - the future of manned space travel?
SpaceX Starship
When I watched the first successful launch and landing of the SpaceX Starhopper test rocket on July 25, 2019, the first thing that came to my mind was, okay, so successfully flew a huge gas tank. It reached a maximum altitude of 66 feet and landed 490 feet away, so what? And then came the larger ones that looked more like a barn silo than it did a rocket. Some of those blew up, but some flew and landed. Okay, so now they have flying barn silos, so what? Finally, they added fins and a nosecone to these rockets, and now we have what looks like the rocket ships seen in the 1950s Sci-Fi space movies. When some of these rockets blew up during the early flight tests, I thought—is Elon Musk going to go down in history like Howard Hughes, another eccentric billionaire that built the Spruce Goose, the plane with the largest wingspan built at the time that could barely fly? But after seeing some of the other Starship flights that followed with successful launches and landings, I thought—they may actually have something there!
The SpaceX strategy of build, fly, make changes and repeat, seems to have worked very well for them. We’ve all seen the incredible success SpaceX has had with their Falcon 9 rockets. Today, the Falcon 9 rocket has clearly achieved amazing reliability and is currently the only orbital rocket that is fully reusable. The Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule have delivered supplies and passengers to the ISS, and are now responsible for the first all civilian orbital flight.
The success and reliability of the Falcon 9, combined with the amazing progress we have witnessed with the recent successful flight tests of the Starship, SpaceX won over many fans. (This author included.) In fact, it has caught the eyes of NASA to the point of awarding SpaceX with a $2.9 billion contract to build the lunar lander for the upcoming Artemis Mission to return to the moon. As of this writing, it appears that the lunar lander will be some variation of the Starship, which will provide NASA with a vehicle to land astronauts on the moon as well as provide a habitat for the beginning of a permanent lunar base.
Watch the video below and see for yourself why I suspect the Starship will become the future of manned space travel and speed up our the deployment of future manned space missions. The future may be here before we know it!