Sonntag, 29. September 2019 - 19:10

Raumfahrt - SpaceX’s Elon Musk: odds of Starship reaching orbit by 2020 are “rising rapidly” Update-7

22.09.2019

Elon Musk’s upcoming Starship presentation to mark 12 months of rapid progress

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is set to provide a highly anticipated update on the company’s Starship program on September 28th from Boca Chica, Texas. The presentation is expected to take place in front of the first nearly completed Starship prototype – capping off 12 months of rapid progress which has seen the program transition from fancy renders to reality.

Over the past few years, Musk has been conducting annual presentations on the status of SpaceX’s next-generation vehicles designed to colonize the Moon and Mars.

While the names of the vehicles have changed numerous times over the years, the spacecraft is currently called Starship with its first stage booster called Super Heavy.

The system is designed to be fully reusable – with both Super Heavy and Starship capable of landing propulsively.

During last year’s presentation, Musk announced that Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa had purchased a flight to send Maezawa and several artists around the Moon. While the news caught the attention of many, the launch vehicle was still in the very early phases of development.

A prototype carbon fiber tank barrel and a few sub-scale Raptor engines were all that SpaceX had to show for physical hardware.

That’s the first BFR airframe/tank barrel section made of a new carbon fiber material

Furthermore, at SpaceX’s launch site in Boca Chica, there was not much more than a mound of dirt. And, the state of affairs were similar at a planned Starship factory at the Port of Los Angeles.

While the concept was exciting, the launch system was far from flight-ready.

Fast forward 12 months and the state of Starship development is radically different.

In Boca Chica, the mound of dirt has been transformed into an operational launch site – outfitted with the ground support equipment needed to support test flights of the methane-fueled Starship vehicles.

Two untethered flights of a test vehicle called Starhopper have already occurred at the pad – the most recent to an altitude of 150 meters.

Additionally, at the nearby operations center, the first full-scale Starship vehicle is nearing completion and is expected to be the backdrop of the upcoming presentation.

And if that was not enough, a second Starship prototype is also nearing completion near Cape Canaveral, Florida. That vehicle will be launched from Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center which is already undergoing renovations to prepare for the upcoming Starship flights.

As for the factory at the Port of Los Angeles, it was scrapped just weeks after Musk’s 2018 presentation. The cancellation was made after a radical change of plans which saw the Starship and Super Heavy designs pivot from carbon fiber to steel.

The switch was made to reduce the technical complexity of the project and removed the need for a factory with advanced machinery.

Consequently, SpaceX is now assembling the vehicles near their launch site, as transporting a nine-meter diameter rocket for thousands of miles is less than ideal.

The move away from carbon fiber quickly paid dividends. Steel is an easier material to work with, and thus within weeks the first prototype vehicle was being assembled in Boca Chica.

The flurry of activity was a dramatic change for the local community. For years, the Boca Chica facility had sat idle as plans to launch SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets from the site never materialized.

However, in the final weeks of 2018, a nine-meter diameter steel structure began to rise in South Texas. It was the beginnings of Starhopper, a Starship test-bed designed to perform small hops using a full-scale Raptor engine.

By March of 2019, the vehicle was ready for action. Over the course of the following months, it performed numerous tests including three static fires and two flight tests. The flight tests saw the vehicle hop to 18 meters in altitude on July 25th. This was followed by a flight to 150 meters on August 27th.

The 150 meter hop was the final flight of Starhopper. It is now set to be converted into a vertical Raptor test stand – with the flight test campaign transitioning to a full-scale Starship prototype.

Named Starship Mk1, the new prototype is expected to perform flights to much greater altitudes – with a launch to around 20 kilometers expected in the coming weeks.

To do so, the vehicle will be far more advanced than the single-engine Starhopper. Not only will it be substantially taller, but Mk1 will also be outfitted with landing gear, control surfaces, and three Raptor engines.

SpaceX teams have been racing around the clock to prepare the Mk1 vehicle for the presentation on September 28th – with the goal of having the vehicle’s primary structure fully assembled in time for the event.

During the presentation, Musk is expected to outline the current state of the program, including the methane-powered Raptor engines, launch site developments, and changes to Starship’s design since the last presentation.

Like all previous years, this year’s update will once again feature a change in the aero surfaces of the vehicle – used to help the spacecraft navigate in the atmosphere before landing.

However, the latest evolution of the design is expected to be much more mature than previous years – with SpaceX allocating far greater resources to the program over the past 12 months.

Slight tweaks to the Super Heavy booster – the first stage which will be used to launch Starship into orbit from Earth – are also expected to be announced at next weekend’s presentation.

The number of Raptor engines on Super Heavy will be one particular area of interest, as that has changed several times over the course of development.

Renders and potentially an animation of Starship and Super Heavy launching from Boca Chica and Pad 39A are also heavily anticipated.

The plans for the launch pads have only materialized over the past few months, with many of the details found in environmental documents already outdated.

What is known is that modifications are well underway to prepare the Boca Chica and Kennedy Space Center-based pads for their respective Starship activities.

In Boca Chica, Texas, construction is ongoing to transition the launch pad from Starhopper to Starship flights.

Since Starship is substantially bigger than the Starhopper, the vehicle will require additional propellant. Thus, teams have been working to increase the propellant storage capacity at the launch site.

Most notably, a large liquid oxygen tank was moved from a nearby storage site to the launch pad on Thursday.

The Boca Chica launch site is also expected to see the addition of a launch mount for Starship. Unlike Starhopper which lifted off directly from the concrete pad, the Mk1 prototype will be elevated slightly by a steel structure.

Similar activities are underway at Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida as that launch site also prepares for Starship flights.

Pad 39A will soon be used for flights of the Starship Mk2 prototype. The Florida-based Mk2 vehicle is nearly identical to the Texas-based Mk1 prototype and will also be used for high altitude test flights.

The Mk2 prototype will be launched from a new launch mount which is similar to the one being prepared for installation at Boca Chica.

It is understood that the mount for Pad 39A has been undergoing construction in the Horizontal Integration Facility (HIF) at the launch site. The HIF is normally used to store Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

SpaceX officially broke ground on the foundational work for the launch mount on Thursday evening. The following morning, bulldozers and other heavy machinery were spotted at the pad.

This work is expected to only take a couple of weeks – with the launch mount installation occurring shortly after.

However, it will take slightly longer for the required ground support equipment to be in place and ready to support a launch.

Unlike Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy which use kerosene as the fuel, Starship uses methane. Thus, SpaceX will have to install additional fuel tanks in order to make Pad 39A Starship compatible.

If all goes well, the Boca Chica and 39A Starship pads will then eventually be converted to support a full Starship stack including the Super Heavy first stage booster. The addition of the first stage will allow for flights into orbit.

How and when this will occur will be a subject of interest at next weekend’s presentation.

Quelle: NS

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Update: 23.09.2019

Elon Musk tweets a sneak peek at his vision for SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket

Members of SpaceX’s team in Texas use cranes to add rear moving fins to the Starship Mk1 prototype. (Elon Musk via Twitter)

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is talking up his Starship Mk1 prototype super-rocket in Texas, less than a week in advance of an eagerly awaited update on his plans for Starship trips to the moon, Mars and beyond.

Today’s sneak preview came in a flurry of tweets addressing some of the finer design points for Starship Mk1, which looks like a silvery silo equipped with rocket fins as it sits at SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility in South Texas. The 30-foot-wide, roughly 150-foot-tall prototype — and a similar Mk2 structure taking shape at SpaceX’s site in Florida — are meant to blaze a trail for an even bigger two-stage rocket, with the pointy-ended Starship sitting atop a Super Heavy first-stage booster.

During a live-streamed presentation that’s set for Saturday at the Boca Chica site, Musk is expected to discuss plans for testing and flying the Starship system over the next few years.

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has already struck a deal with SpaceX to take a Starship flight around the moon by the mid-2020s, and is reportedly planning to sell a multibillion-dollar stake in his fashion retail company to cover the cost.

Musk has said Starship (previously known as the BFR) could take on flights to Mars by the mid-2020s, plus crewed trips to the moon and supersonic point-to-point trips between destinations on Earth. He didn’t address those beyond-Earth visions in today’s tweets, but in a discussion with his followers, he did get into the nuts and bolts of Starship design — including what’s going to be packed inside the prototype’s nose cone, or fairing.

Musk also said there are some aspects of the design that he’s not yet “fully bought into.”

Elon Musk Twitter:Just leaving SpaceX Starship build site in Boca

Elon Musk Twitter: Bottom half of Starship at night. Top half with forward fins & header tanks probably stacks on Wednesday. Three Raptors already installed.

Quelle: GeekWire

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Update: 24.09.2019

Homeowners reject SpaceX buyout offer

Some homeowners at Boca Chica Village insist they have no intention of accepting a recent offer from SpaceX to purchase their properties.

Unlike most of their neighbors, Terry and Bonnie Heaton, originally from Michigan, live year-round in the unincorporated hamlet with about 35 houses near Boca Chica Beach. They’ve lived there 18 years. During the winter when the neighborhood fills up, it’s a real community where everyone helps each other, Terry said.

“It’s almost like we’ve got an extended family here, because of the closeness of this neighborhood,” he said. “We’ve got a tight bond.”

Although the Hawthorne, Calif.-based rocket company, in a letter dated Sept. 12 and sent via FedEx, is offering the Heatons three times the appraised value of their home, they say the offer isn’t close to what they’d need to sell. The appraisal conducted by SpaceX is several thousand dollars less than an appraisal the Heatons got through their bank five years ago, Terry said.

“I sent them an email the day after we got this letter, not being sarcastic or anything else,” he said. “I just told them the facts, that (their) appraisal is extremely low.”

SpaceX said the offers are not negotiable and gave the homeowners two weeks from the date of the letter to respond.

“It’s just big money bullying little people,” Terry said. “That’s really what it is.”

The couple said they have no idea where they would relocate, that Boca Chica is unique in the United States and that finding a suitable similar setup would be impossible with what SpaceX is offering. Terry said he’d take $1 million for the property, though Bonnie isn’t sure she’d be willing to leave even then.

“It’s been so beautiful out here all these years,” she said. “It’s been so peaceful, and when the kids come down from up north they just love it here. … It’s just so sad, because this is where we wanted to be until we die. This is our home, you know?”

Celia Johnson bought her house next door to the Heatons in 1992. She was born and raised in Brownsville and has gone to Boca Chica Beach since she was a kid. Now she lives in Lansing, Mich., during the summer. Johnson said she’s rejecting SpaceX’s offer because it’s too low.

Home appraisals are based in part on the selling prices of similar properties in the area, but SpaceX’s recent appraisals are based on a handful of sales — to SpaceX — that were well below market value and as a result skew the new appraisals downward, she said.

Johnson cited the example of a neighbor who bought a house in Boca Chica Village for well over $100,000 but ended up selling it to the company for $50,000.

“I know he took a huge loss,” Johnson said.

She said she’s spoken with other neighbors who felt intimidated and sold their homes far below market value only to regret it later.

“They got ripped off and I know they did,” Johnson said.

The amount of money SpaceX is offering her isn’t enough to find a new house somewhere like Boca Chica. Johnson said she’d planned to retire there to be near family in Brownsville, but doesn’t want to live in the city herself. Johnson said she isn’t contemplating the possibility that she may have to leave some day.

Home owners reject SpaceX buyout

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“I guess I’m just going to take it on a daily basis and see what happens,” she said.

Terry Heaton admitted to worrying that he and his wife will be forced to leave someday after all, as SpaceX’s operation grows and the rockets become bigger and more powerful. To him, it’s not fair that after being there so many years and only wanting to live in peace, “all of a sudden somebody’s trying to kick you out,” he said.

“Does that make us happy? No. It scares us, really,” Heaton said. “We can talk tough all we want, but the reality is the time will come.”

Obviously, they couldn’t have guessed in a million years that a rocket company would move in next door, he said.

“If that would have been so, we never would have bought here,” Heaton said.

Quelle: VALLEY STAR

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Update: 26.09.2019

SpaceX’s Starship to grow in height as workers prepare to stack its top

section

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has teased new details and posted several new photos of Starship Mk1, taken on September 25th as employees worked to lift the spacecraft’s lower half onto a mobile transporter. Up next: stacking the rocket’s two halves to reach its final 50m (160 ft) height.

The company is currently working around the clock to complete Starship Mk1’s assembly and integration ahead of Elon Musk’s planned September 28th presentation, meant to provide a detailed update on the state of the next-generation rocket’s design and development. A huge amount of work clearly remains but SpaceX is making major, visible progress almost every single day along the path to Starship’s first flight tests.

On the transporter

Taken yesterday afternoon, Musk’s photos show scenes before and after technicians placed Starship Mk1’s lower half – its tank and propulsion section – on a ‘Roll-Lift’, a small transporter. It’s unclear why exactly this was done, but SpaceX moved the spacecraft prototype about 100m and then removed it from the transporter.

Lifting lower section of Starship

The most recent movement happened just a few hours ago – technicians used a crane delivered on September 24th to lift the half-Starship onto what looked like half a dozen steel blocks on the ground, all captured live on LabPadre’s 24/7 livestream. In order to install Starship Mk1’s separate landing legs, believed to attach somewhere inside the vehicle’s aft circumference, SpaceX likely needed to lift the aft section off the concrete mount that had been its home for the past several months.

Elon Musk also confirmed that Starship Mk1 will have six landing legs, another strong indicator that the ongoing Thursday morning work is focused on preparing Starship Mk1 for leg installation. According to Musk, Starship Mk1 will weigh as much as 200 metric tons (440,000 lb) empty, which is probably why the rocket prototype’s aft – and heaviest – half had to be loaded onto a Roll-Lift and could not simply be moved by the crane itself.

Mk1 ship is around 200 tons dry & 1400 tons wet, but aiming for 120 by Mk4 or Mk5. Total stack mass with max payload is 5000 tons.

Starship’s updated design remains a bit of a mystery just two days before Elon Musk is scheduled to present an update, likely including new renders from SpaceX itself. It remains to be seen if Starship’s six landing legs will be fixed (versus retractable) or if the legs on the windward side of the ship will jut out into the airstream. To ensure stability when landing on unprepared terrain, as Musk described, six legs are certainly better than three, but the actual span of those legs is a more relevant determinant of stability. Wide, Falcon 9-style legs would be optimal, indicating that the final ship will likely lean towards legs that can be retracted or at least angled behind Starship’s reentry ‘shadow’.

Still a prototype (and possibly meant solely for suborbital operation), Starship Mk1 (and Mk2) may feature simplified legs and mechanisms to speed things along, serving as more of a rough draft while Starhopper was akin to a Starship abstract or prospectus. At this rate, we won’t have to wait very long at all to find out.

Quelle: TESLARATI

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Update: 27.09.2019

SpaceX to update Starship progress

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted this image Sept. 26 of the three Raptor engines in the base of the Starship Mark 1 vehicle being built at the company's South Texas site, ahead of a planned update on vehicle development there Sept. 28. Credit: Twitter @elonmusk

WASHINGTON — SpaceX will provide an update Sept. 28 on the progress it’s making on its next-generation Starship vehicle, including plans to start flying a prototype in as soon as a month.

Elon Musk, founder and chief executive of the company, is set to discuss work on Starship in a presentation at the company’s South Texas test site at Boca Chica, near Brownsville, Texas. The event is expected to be webcast, although the company hasn’t disclosed specifics.

Musk, meanwhile, has been providing updates from the Boca Chica site as crews there work to assemble the first Starship prototype, called Mark 1. In recent days Musk has been tweeting images of the vehicle, including a view of its three Raptor engines installed in the base of the vehicle.

An earlier prototype, Starhopper, flew Aug. 27 from the site, ascending to an altitude of 150 meters before landing on a neighboring pad a minute after takeoff. That vehicle, powered by a single Raptor engine, won’t fly again, with the company instead using it as an engine test stand.

The Starship Mark 1 vehicle being built at Boca Chica will start flying in the near future on high-altitude test flights. “This is quite a complex beast, but hopefully within a month or so,” Musk said Sept. 26 when asked on Twitter when he expected the vehicle to make its first flight.

That schedule is likely dependent on not just the technical progress the company makes on the vehicle, but also getting approvals, such as an experimental permit or launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration. The Starhopper test flight was pushed back because of challenges modifying SpaceX’s existing FAA permit for the vehicle because of hazard analyses. The FAA did ultimately modify the permit, but allowed only a single flight to 150 meters altitude and greatly increased the company’s third-party liability requirement.

Musk has also discussed some design changes to the vehicle he’s expected to elaborate upon at the upcoming presentation. The Mark 1 vehicle has two fins and six landing legs, a departure from prior designs that had three fins, with landing legs incorporated into them. The six landing legs, he tweeted, provide “redundancy for landing on unimproved surfaces,” he said.

As for the two fins, Musk said that choice was driven by vehicle mass. “Current analysis, which I’m not fully bought into, suggests that 2 rear fins with separate airframe-mounted legs will be lighter, so this is the plan for Mk1/Mk2,” he tweeted. Mark 2 is a separate Starship prototype SpaceX is building in parallel in Cocoa, Florida, near Cape Canaveral.

The vehicle has smaller fins at the top of the vehicle as well. “Nose tip has forward movable fins, cold gas attitude control thrusters, header tanks for landing, composite pressure vessels, several large batteries, etc.,” he said, whose mass is intended to balance the Raptor engines and fins at the base of the vehicle.

The entire mass of the vehicle is about 200 tons “dry,” or unfueled, and 1,400 tons when filled with liquid oxygen and methane propellants, Musk said. That dry mass, though, will go down in future versions, with SpaceX “aiming for 120 [tons] by Mk4 or Mk5.”

While Starship will perform vertical takeoffs and landings from both Boca Chica and the Kennedy Space Center, where SpaceX plans to test fly the Mark 2 version of Starship, the vehicle will eventually be the upper stage launched on a large booster called Super Heavy. Musk, though, said that developing Super Heavy, which will have more than 30 Raptor engines, will be less challenging to build than Starship.

“Super Heavy rocket will be much like Falcon 9,” Musk tweeted, “but the Ship is a strange combination of Dragon, F9 & a skydiver.”

Quelle: SN

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Update: 28.09.2019

SpaceX Finishes Assembling New Starship Prototype

The Mk1 is fully stacked.

Elon Musk tweeted this photo of the newly assembled Starship Mk1 prototype on Sept. 27, 2019.

(Image: © Elon Musk via Twitter)

We can now take the full measure of SpaceX's latest Starship prototype.

The company has mated the top and bottom halves of the Starship Mk1 vehicleat its South Texas facilities, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said today (Sept. 27).

"Starship halves being joined," he posted on Twitter, along with a photo of the sleek silver Mk1.

The milestone comes just in time for Musk's big weekend announcement: On Saturday evening (Sept. 28), the billionaire entrepreneur will reveal the latest design of Starship and Super Heavy, the spacecraft and rocket that SpaceX is developing to help humanity settle the moon, Mars and other distant worlds.

The presentation will take place at the South Texas site, which is near the village of Boca Chica. The newly stacked Mk1 will presumably serve as a dramatic backdrop.

Musk tends to give such big updates once per year; he has done so every autumn since 2016. He also parcels out interesting design details via Twitter from time to time.

Both Starship and Super Heavy will be fully and rapidly reusable, and the duo could begin flying commercial missions as soon as 2021, SpaceX representatives have said. The first operational flights will likely launch communications satellites, but there is a crewed Starship mission on the docket for 2023 — a round-the-moon flight booked by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa.

Starship will be capable of carrying 100 passengers and will be powered by six of SpaceX's next-generation Raptor engines, Musk has said. Super Heavy, meanwhile, will feature 35 Raptors.

But those details may have changed; we'll have to wait until tomorrow's presentation tomorrow to find out.

SpaceX is working its way up to the final Starship iteration via a series of prototypes. The first test version, the single-engine Starhopper, was retired last month after acing its second and final untethered flight from Boca Chica.

The 165-foot-tall (50 meters) Mk1 is the next in line. This three-engine vehicle will initially fly to an altitude of about 12 miles (20 kilometers), perhaps as early as next month, Musk has said. The Mk1 will go into Earth orbit on future test flights, if all goes according to plan.

The outlook is similar for Starship Mk2, which SpaceX is building at its Florida facilities. The goal is to improve the final design of Starship via some competition between the two sites, Musk has said.

Quelle: SC

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Elon Musk: Rage, rage against the dying of the light

Quelle: SpaceX

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Update: 29.09.2019

Musk unveils SpaceX rocket designed to get to Mars and back

Elon Musk has unveiled a SpaceX spacecraft designed to carry a crew and cargo to the moon, Mars or anywhere else in the solar system and land back on Earth perpendicularly.

In a livestreamed speech from SpaceX's launch facility near the southern tip of Texas, Musk said Saturday that the space venture's Starship is expected to take off for the first time in about one or two months and reach 65,000 feet (19,800 meters) before landing back on Earth.

He says it's essential for the viability of space travel to be able to reuse spacecraft and that it's important to take steps to extend consciousness beyond our planet.

A crowd watched as Musk spoke from a stage in front of the large spacecraft, which has a reflective, metal exterior.

Musk says Saturday marked the 11th anniversary of a SpaceX rocket reaching orbit for the first time.

Quelle: abcNews

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Five things we learned from Elon Musk’s rollout of the SpaceX Starship prototype

A prototype of SpaceX’s Starship Mars spaceship could reach orbit in less than six months and fly humans next year, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said Saturday during an unveiling at the company’s facility in south Texas.

Standing in front of the towering stainless steel prototype known as Starship Mk 1, Musk told an audience the Hawthorne company would be building versions of the spacecraft in rapid succession at two different SpaceX facilities — one near Boca Chica Beach in Texas and one in Cocoa, Fla.

The goal is to build at least two per site before SpaceX starts work on the Super Heavy rocket booster that will power Starship to orbit. Both Starship and Super Heavy are intended to eventually replace SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket and its newer Falcon Heavy rocket, which first launched last year.

Musk did not give an updated timeline for when Starship — essentially a second-stage rocket and lander — would go to Mars. SpaceX has said its “aspirational goal” is to send cargo missions to the Red Planet in 2022.

“It’s going to be pretty epic to see this thing take off and come back,” said Musk said of Starship.

Here are some other takeaways from Musk’s presentation.

Starship Mk 1 could launch soon

Musk estimated that the prototype could be test-launched to an altitude of about 60,000 feet in one to two months. Musk, however, is known for overly optimistic timelines — in 2016, SpaceX said it could send an uncrewed Dragon capsule to Mars as soon as 2018. That mission did not happen, and SpaceX’s plans for Mars changed to use Starship, rather than Dragon capsules.

SpaceX is building Starships quickly

SpaceX’s team at Boca Chica Beach built Starship Mk 1 in about four to five months, Musk said. That was after he changed the design from a carbon fiber exterior to stainless steel — a design he said would be cheaper, heat-resistant and would result in a similarly strong, lightweight vehicle.

This rocket system will have a lot of fire power

The Starship spaceship will have six Raptor rocket engines, which use liquid oxygen and methane as propellant. The Super Heavy booster could have as many as 37 Raptor engines, though Musk said that number was still in flux and could drop to as few as 24.

When stacked together, Starship and Super Heavy will be about 387 feet tall, more than twice the height of the Starship Mk 1 that was the centerpiece of Saturday’s event.The completed Starship and Super Heavy stack would be 150 feet taller than United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy rocket, which is the tallest U.S. operational rocket today.

90-1-1

Rendering of a prototype of SpaceX’s Starship Mars spaceship.

(SpaceX)

Starship development only involves a small portion of the company

Though Starship was the focus of Saturday’s event, Musk said less than 5% of SpaceX’s resources were dedicated to working on development of the Mars spaceship.

“From a SpaceX resource standpoint,” Musk said, “our resources are overwhelmingly on Falcon and Dragon.”

Musk is under pressure to deliver on other programs. In addition to commercial and government satellite launches, SpaceX is also under contract with NASA, as is Boeing Co., to develop separate crewed spacecraft capable of carrying NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. SpaceX flew an uncrewed Dragon capsule to the space station in March, but that capsule was later destroyed in an accident during a ground test.

On Friday, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted that although he was “looking forward to the SpaceX announcement” Saturday, the commercial crew astronaut transport program was “years behind schedule.”

90-2

A prototype of SpaceX’s Starship Mars spaceship could reach orbit in less than six months, Elon Musk said at Saturday's presentation.

(SpaceX)

“NASA expects to see the same level of enthusiasm focused on the investments of the American taxpayer,” Bridenstine tweeted. “It’s time to deliver.”

Both SpaceX’s and Boeing’s schedules for capsule test launches have slipped over the years.

Musk is interested in a lunar presence

Musk said Saturday it would be “very exciting to have a base on the moon,” adding that a base focused on scientific research would be useful.

His moon musings come as NASA has stated that it plans to return to the moon and land astronauts at the moon’s South Pole by 2024.

Quelle: Los Angeles Times

Raumfahrt - SpaceX’s Elon Musk: odds of Starship reaching orbit by 2020 are “rising rapidly” Update-7

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