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The biggest rocket ever built could be ready to fly surprisingly soon.
SpaceX’s first full-scale prototype Vessel The vehicle should be ready for launch on an orbital test flight “in a few weeks”, company founder and CEO Elon Musk said via Twitter on Saturday (August 14).
This goal seems very close, given that EspaceX has yet to pass the 395-foot-high (120-meter) rocket through its usual battery of preflight testing. And there’s a big logistical hurdle to overcome, too: The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is conducting an environmental assessment of SpaceX’s orbital launch site in South Texas, where Starship will take off.
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The FAA has yet to release its draft review, and the agency will accept public comments on the report for 30 days after its release. So the Starship’s orbital getaway can’t happen in just a few weeks – a reality Musk acknowledged in his tweet on Saturday, which ended with the words “awaiting regulatory approval.”
In fact, Musk’s tweet may have been designed to put a little pressure on the FAA to step up the pace. After all, he has expressed frustration with FAA regulations in the past, stressing that these rules must be streamlined if humanity is ever to achieve game-changing launch frequencies.
And SpaceX wants Starship to be a game-changer. The vehicle, which consists of a huge first-stage booster known as the Super Heavy and a spaceship called the Starship, is designed to take people and goods to the moon, Mars and other distant destinations. .
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SpaceX led test flights of previous Starship prototypes, sending the spacecraft 10 kilometers into the sky from the site in South Texas, located near the village of Boca Chica on the Gulf Coast. But the next test flight will mark the first time a fully stacked Starship – a Super Heavy topped off by a Starship spacecraft – will take off, and the first time the system has reached orbit.
If all goes as planned, the Super Heavy will descend into the Gulf of Mexico shortly after takeoff. The spacecraft, meanwhile, will go into orbit, circle our planet once, and descend into the Pacific Ocean, near the Hawaiian island of Kauai.
SpaceX has already taken a few steps towards this historic flight. On August 6, for example, the company stacked the two components of the spaceship – a 29-engine Super Heavy called Booster 4 and a six-engine prototype spacecraft known as the SN20 – atop the South Texas Orbital Launch Mount for the very first time. But the duo were unstacked later in the day so technicians could do extra work on each item.
Mike Wall is the author of “The low“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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