With Starship SN15, Elon Musk Has Proved Reaching Mars Is No Fantasy

¡°Starship landing nominal!¡± Elon Musk tweeted on May 5, after SpaceX sent the latest prototype of its spacecraft roaring into the skies, achieving what the previous five tests could not: a successful landing.

The first two prototypes soared to high altitudes, slammed onto the launching pad and burst into flames immediately; another exploded midair; while the SN10 prototype did perform a successful landing in March but blew up 10 minutes later.

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Even as they kept falling from the sky, SpaceX engineers were busy working on newer prototypes. For Musk, it's about moving fast, learning through trial and error, and getting closer and closer to the right design by developing novel engineering methods on the fly.

Twitter/Elon Musk

This successful fifth test was a product of this trial and error method and seemingly the most important as it came a month after SpaceX won a highly-coveted contract from NASA to use this mega-spaceship to land humans on the moon as soon as 2024.

It all started with a crazy dream

Elon Musk's private spaceflight company SpaceX, founded over two decades ago, aims to make humanity a multi-planet species and is partly motivated by existential threats such as an asteroid collision big enough to wipe out humanity.

ALSO READ: SpaceX's Starship Makes 1st Successful Landing, As Elon Musk Gets Closer To Mars

¡°If something goes wrong with planet Earth, that's it,¡± he said. ¡°It's game over.¡±

He believes that Starship is the vessel that could make that happen and this smooth landing of SN15 is a big step closer to making it a fully reusable transport system capable of carrying up to 100 people to the Red Planet.

SpaceX Starship

Eventually, SpaceX wants to launch a 1,000 Starship fleet that would take a million people to Mars every time their planetary orbits sync, or every 26 months--an average of three Starship rocket launches a day.

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Musk refers to a million people as the golden number that would be needed to make life sustainable on Mars. And he first shared his idea of a spaceship that would ferry people to deep space in 2016 at an international conference in Mexico.

Starship: the reusable deep-space vessel

The spacecraft sits atop a rocket called Super Heavy and is designed to carry humans and cargo into low-Earth orbit, to the moon, and Mars, then return to Earth to do it all over again.

SpaceX

The combined system, which is referred to as 'Starship', will be the world's most powerful launch vehicle ever developed, with the ability to carry in excess of 100 metric tonnes to Earth orbit--even greater than SpaceX's Falcon Heavy which is already twice as strong as the world's next best rocket and can lift 63 million tons into Space.

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Let's start with the 'Super Heavy Booster', or as Musk would say, the ¡°Big F******g Rocket,¡± or BFR for short. It's big, alright. Standing at 25-storeys (70m) high. I mean, look at this guy standing on the lift. And while you gape at the sheer enormity of this booster, imagine another 20-storeys (50m) for the Starship spacecraft which would sit right on top of it.

First Super Heavy Booster pic.twitter.com/0K5QPsEbbt

¡ª Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 18, 2021

This next-generation launch system will be filled with 3,400 tons of sub-cooled liquid methane and liquid oxygen (CH4/LOX) propellants, which will power 28 Raptor engines. It has a gross liftoff mass of over 3 million kg, which means that it can lift a stack of 1,800 SUVs or 16 Boeing 747 aircraft.

This gigantic booster sends Starship into space, separates in the upper stage and flips over while falling back towards Earth. The Super Heavy will deploy six steel structures called "grid fins", from the sides of the booster, that help the rocket land back on the launch pad for another flight.

The spacecraft, which is made of stainless steel and resembles those from the golden-age of science fiction, will continue its journey onward. Starship will enter Mars' atmosphere at 7.5 kmps and decelerate aerodynamically. SpaceX says the vehicle's heat shield is designed to withstand multiple entries.

SpaceX

It's equipped with six Raptor engines which will presumably create enough power to lift off from the surface of the moon and Mars, where gravity is weaker than that on Earth. And as shown by the prototype, the craft will begin its descent into the Earth's atmosphere, positioned horizontally to slow its momentum, before reorienting itself and making a controlled, nose-up landing.

The Raptor engines of the SN15 prototype shut down one by one as the rocket approached its peak altitude and its descent were guided by two forward and two aft flaps on the vehicle for re-entry. Finally, the three engines relit to flip and slow the vehicle before relying on just a single engine to land.

SpaceX

Starship goes to the moon

The Starship's first journey is to the moon and back. Japanese online retail billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has already booked tickets for himself and eight others for a weeklong Starship flight around the moon in 2023.

Starship will also fly on two missions for NASA. The first one will be a test flight and the second to carry two astronauts to the lunar surface in 2024 as part of the Artemis mission.

SpaceX

But the trip to the Red Planet is right on course. Elon Musk said that he's ¡°highly confident¡± that SpaceX will launch an un-crewed Starship to Mars in 2024, followed by a crewed mission a couple of years later. And to think all of this began with one man's dream is nothing short of fantasy!