After years of anticipation, Starship, the massive launch vehicle built by Elon Musk’s firm SpaceX, may soon blast off from the company’s Texas facility in Boca Chica, Texas.
The $3 billion reusable SpaceX Starship is 395ft (120m) tall and weighs 11 million pounds (5 million kg).
New information from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) suggests that the launch could be as early as Monday, next week. But SpaceX still needs a launch license that could be granted by Monday.
Starship’s first launch into orbit will be an early milestone in Musk’s ambition to carry people and cargo to the moon and Mars in the next few decades.
Elon Musk guaranteed that the Starship launch will be exciting!
Musk earlier said that the launch ‘won’t be boring’, there is a 50% chance that Starship will explode during lift-off.
SpaceX has been testing prototypes of Starship, previously known as ‘BFR’, by launching them into the air and landing them. While some of them exploded in a ball of flames, others returned unscathed.
Starship to become the world’s most powerful operational rocket
The title of the world’s most powerful operational rocket was previously held by SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, but it was dethroned by NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) moon rocket.
The futuristic Starship has been selected by NASA for the recently delayed Artemis missions to the Moon later this decade.
