There are some fresh updates on SpaceX’s Starship, the aircraft that the Elon Musk headed company plans to use for ferrying humans to Mars. Musk shared photos of the work being done on its far-sighted orbital starship prototype named ‘SN1’ which is under construction at its Boca Chica, Texas facility. It aims at establishing a colony at mars which still sounds like sound fiction and Musk seems to be the most suitable person who might turn it into Reality.
Musk shared the photographs of liquid oxygen header tank and nosecone on Thursday at his twitter account. He told that to maintain a human colony on the red planet many megatons of cargo will be ferried per year. He further plans to fly it for an average of three flights per day each carrying nearly 100 passengers. Elon claimed that Starship will be able to travel by itself from surface of Mars to surface of Earth, but requires massive booster on Earth with orbital refilling to get to Mars, which is nearly 38% of Earth’s gravity.
The plan is to construct 1000 starships before the end of decade. An ambitious target by all ambitious means, this will require SpaceX to produce 100 starships per year. The company aims at transporting 100 megatons of cargo per year or about 100,000 passengers per Earth-Mars orbital sync. Orbits of earth and Mars are closest to each other roughly once after two years so it means that flights will be only possible after this much time.
Starship orbital vehicle SN1, liquid oxygen header tank & nosecone pic.twitter.com/IaSEdIyZgP
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 16, 2020
This under-development Mars fleet will get into a staging orbit above Earth, where they can be refueled in space prior to their synchronized departure. After every 26 months nearly 1000 ships will depart for their destinations within 30 days.
The cost of space travel will be another issue for Spacex to handle. Musk also said that this facility needs to be such that anyone can go if they want, with loans available for those who don’t have money. The wider development from Musk’s perspective is to develop reusability in the starships system which means that each Starship needs to have life of 20-30 years that will also help in making space travel a viable option.
