Starship spacecraft prototype almost ready

Elon Musk tweeted a fewStarship Spacecraft Prototype Photos. It is more of a test version of Starhopper. SpaceX is working at an accelerated pace over the prototype and is already preparing for the first test flights.

The company has already applied to the Federal CommissionUnited States Communications (FCC) to obtain permission to launch an orbital ship. In the first test flights, engineers plan to raise the vehicle to a height of 20 km and land back to the spaceport.

It is expected that commercial flights will bebe held no earlier than 2021, and then Starship will become the basis of the SpaceX space business. The company has high commercial hopes for this project, so it is extremely important to keep abreast and monitor the progress of the project in terms of execution and quality of work.

The Starship and Super Heavy (super-heavy missiles) will replace in the future the current families of Falcon rockets and Dragon ships.
The rocket is supposed to be capable ofdeliver cargo to a low Earth orbit up to 150 tons with the return of both stages (Super Heavy and Starship) to Earth. If you use Super Heavy and Starship once, the rocket will put into orbit the load twice as heavy. But such use of expensive devices is impractical.

In the process of developing a rocket system from 2016 toIn 2018, it was repeatedly renamed and presented at the International Congress of Astronautics. Since 2018, the system is called Super Heavy and Starship. SpaceX plans to send on it to the moon a Japanese billionaire; tentatively, this will happen in 2023.

In the future, SpaceX will replace this ship withthe Super Heavy booster block attached to it, the entire fleet of corporation rockets and ships, using it not only for flights to Mars and travels in the Solar system, but also for flights to other stellar systems.

Source: Engadget