Scientists believe that Mars is the best planet for human resettlement. The choice falls on it because it is as close as possible to the Earth; according to calculations, the flight of a manned spacecraft to it takes about 300 days. Also, this planet is much more like our home planet than the rest.
Right now, thousands of people are working to bring the day of the colonization of Mars closer, and specialists from SpaceX are working hard on this. They are developing a starship spacecraft that will be used for flights from Earth to Mars and back. Recently, the head of the company, Elon Musk, held a brief conference during which he spoke about the upcoming plans in the field of space exploration. He announced that he wanted to send a million people to Mars.
Elon Musk Testing the Starship: A Giant Leap for Mankind
The Starship spacecraft is a huge structure that is 120 meters high. It’s higher than the Statue of Liberty in the United States, and if you put it side by side, the rocket will take up the entire football field.
SpaceX regularly holds test launches of the largest rocket in the world. For example, on March 14, experts successfully sent the structure into the sky; it accelerated to 26,000 kilometers per hour, and then two of its stages successfully separated, as a result of which one of them successfully reached orbit. Unfortunately, the ship was lost, but the test was still considered successful.
The Fourth Flight: Pushing Boundaries
During his recent speech, Elon Musk announced that the fourth flight of the Starship would take place “in a month or so.” This means that we will observe this event around the end of May 2024.
During the fourth test, SpaceX wants the starship to be able to withstand the heat of passing through the Earth’s atmosphere. After that, it is necessary for the Super Heavy carrier to land carefully in the specified location in the Gulf of Mexico.
Future Missions: Scaling Up
If all goes well, during the fifth test of the ship Starship, the company will try to catch the carrier missile with the help of the robotic tower “Mehazilla.” We talked about the features of this design earlier in this article. According to Elon Musk, the probability of a successful launch of the carrier missile on the manipulator in 2024 is 90%.
The Human Dimension: Sacrifices and Opportunities
In addition to all this, the billionaire talked about the company’s future plans. Today, SpaceX is testing a prototype of the Starship. In the future, the Starship 2 and Starship 3 models will be used during missions, able to lift 100 and 200 tons, respectively. The cost of launching the Starship 3 could be reduced to $3 million, although it usually requires a minimum of $10 million. The final versions of the missiles will be multi-use, but when exactly they will appear, Elon Musk did not specify.
With the help of the Starship 3 spacecraft, SpaceX wants to send a million people to Mars. During the flight, each ship will need 5–6 additional refueling tanks. The technology of transferring fuel from one ship to another company will try to show in 2025.
Of course, such a huge number of people will be sent to Mars more than once. The company intends to increase the production of spacecraft; in order to achieve its goals, it needs a hundred space vehicles to fly in space.
The SpaceX Starship: A Marvel of Engineering
Elon Musk warned that people who went to Mars were unlikely to return. It turns out that some people of the future will be able to live their entire lives on a colonized planet and learn about the Earth only from stories, books, and videos. But when people will go to Mars, how the selection of colonizers will take place is unknown to date. But many sources say it will happen in the coming years.
The SpaceX Starship is the largest and most powerful spacecraft ever built by man. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, it is greater than the Statue of Liberty, and its ability to lift hundreds of tons of cargo is quite impressive. On our site, there is a great article that will help you learn about this technological masterpiece. Read our article, “SpaceX Starship: A Rocket That Will Send People to Mars and the Moon.”.
