As SpaceX’s Starship underwent the static fire test Monday ahead of its second test flight, CEO Elon Musk has expressed his optimism about the ambitious spacecraft, which according to him, is planned to bring humans to Mars.
In his unique style of tweeting in a few words, 51-year-old Musk wrote: “Prelude to Mars”.
Musk aerospace company tested its Ship 25, the upper-stage prototype lighting all of its six Raptor engines for about five seconds at the Starbase site in South Texas.
It is a kind of prelaunch test where the spacecraft is on the ground with its engines started for a brief period.
Earlier in a tweet, Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla, said the Starship test flight is in the next six to eight weeks.
The 394-foot-tall Starship’s first test flight was conducted in April in which the self-destruct mechanism was triggered due to technical issues while it was miles above the Earth.
The spaceship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built with 33 Raptors of its first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, generating about 16.7 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, nearly twice the total of Nasa’s Space Launch System mega rocket.
“Starship will be the world’s most powerful launch vehicle ever developed, capable of carrying up to 150 metric tonnes fully reusable and 250 metric tonnes expendable” SpaceX describes its spacecraft.
Bloomberg reported that Musk’s SpaceX has invested around $3 billion in 2023.
“So I think the probability of the next flight working — or getting to orbit — is much higher than the last one,” Musk told Bloomberg in an interview.
“Maybe it’s like 60%; it depends on how well we do at stage separation,” He added.
Nasa awarded Musk’s aerospace company a contract to carry out an unpiloted lunar landing test flight to clear the way for the Artemis 3 mission.
Earlier, Jim Free, Nasa’s chief of exploration systems development, told the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board expressed his concerns about the delay in Nasa’s moon landing mission Artemis 3 which is two and a half years away.
Under Nasa’s Artemis 3 mission which is scheduled to take astronauts to the moon in 2025, it will land humans on the lunar surface after more than fifty years.
“They have a significant number of launches to go and that, of course, gives me concern about the December of 2025 date,” adding that “SpaceX is on contract to do an uncrewed lander.”