In a media interaction at his sci-fi like ‘Starbase’ office, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Spacex, said that he was “highly confident” his new SpaceX Starship will take to orbit this year. For those unaware, Starship is Musk’s attempt to create a space voyage vehicle, which is strong and endurant enough to take humans on long and repeated journeys to Moon and Mars.
While that vision has been extremely grand all throughout, Starship has had multiple technical glitches and failures. Such is the complexity and difficulty in operating such a spaceship, that it took four massive, expensive failures to get it off the ground itself. That happened nine months back, and Musk now feels that they have the capability to finally take it to orbit this year.
“I feel at this point highly confident that we will get to orbit (with the Starship) this year,” said Musk
He did caution, that there are still technical difficulties around the development of “Raptor 2” engines for its Super Heavy rocket. One of the critical ones being the melting of material inside thrusters, due to the massive heat that is generated at lift-off. He added though, that “we’re very close to solving that,” and expected to scale up production to about seven or eight of the engines a week by next month and produce a new Starship and a booster every month by year’s end.
