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Elon Musk reveals progress of Mars-bound Starship spacecraft

SpaceX is building craft to ferry people and cargo around the Solar System

Anthony Cuthbertson

Friday 27 March 2020 15:51 GMT

The Starship space craft built by SpaceX could land on the moon by 2021, Elon Musk claims (SpaceX)

SpaceX boss Elon Musk has revealed the latest progress of the Mars-bound Starship spacecraft, less than a month after a prototype exploded during a test.

Images of the third prototype of Starship, known as SN3, were shared on Twitter, showing the tank and engine sections at an assembly facility in South Texas.

The Starship craft is being built for the purpose of ferrying people and cargo around the Solar System, with the eventual goal of sending people to Mars.

Launched from Earth using SpaceX's Super Heavy rocket, Starship will use its own onboard rockets to navigate and land on the surface of the planet.

SpaceX has already performed various successful tests of previous Starship prototypes, including a launch and landing of the Starhopper craft.

Earlier this month, a cryogenic pressure test was less successful, resulting in a dramatic explosion.

Before reaching Mars, SpaceX plans to use Starship for trips to the moon. Places on the spacecraft, which can hold up to 100 people, have already been reserved for a round-the-moon voyage in 2023.

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa will be the first space tourist on the trip, having paid a significant deposit to secure his place.

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

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1/10Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Mystic Mountain, a pillar of gas and dust standing at three-light-years tall, bursting with jets of gas from fledgling stars buried within, was captured by Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope in February 2010

Nasa/ESA/STScI

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

The first ever selfie taken on an alien planet, captured by Nasa's Curiosity Rover in the early days of its mission to explore Mars in 2012

Nasa/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Death of a star: This image from Nasa's Chandra X-ray telescope shows the supernova of Tycho, a star in our Milky Way galaxy

Nasa

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Arrokoth, the most distant object ever explored, pictured here on 1 January 2019 by a camera on Nasa's New Horizons spaceraft at a distance of 4.1 billion miles from Earth

Getty

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory in January 2012. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust

Nasa

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

The first ever image of a black hole, captured by the Event Horizon telescope, as part of a global collaboration involving Nasa, and released on 10 April 2019. The image reveals the black hole at the centre of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides about 54 million light-years from Earth

Getty

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Pluto, as pictured by Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft as it flew over the dwarf planet for the first time ever in July 2015

Nasa/APL/SwRI

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

A coronal mass ejection as seen by the Chandra Observatory in 2019. This is the first time that Chandra has detected this phenomenon from a star other than the Sun

Nasa

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Dark, narrow, 100 meter-long streaks running downhill on the surface Mars were believed to be evidence of contemporary flowing water. It has since been suggested that they may instead be formed by flowing sand

Nasa/JPL/University of Arizona

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Morning Aurora: Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station in October 2015

Nasa/Scott Kelly

Mr Musk has spoken frequently of his ambition to travel to Mars, claiming in a 2013 interview that he wanted to die on Mars, however he recently cast doubts on whether quick enough progress was being made.

"Unless we improve our rate of innovation dramatically, there is no chance of a base on the moon or a city on Mars [in my lifetime]," he said at the Satellite 2020 conference earlier this month.

"If we don't improve our pace of progress, I'm definitely going to be dead before we go to Mars... If it's taken us 18 years just to get ready to do the first people to orbit, we've got to improve our rate of innovation or, based on past trends, I am definitely going to be dead before Mars."

The 48-year-old tech billionaire believes that colonising Mars is essential to ensure humanity's survival from any potential mass extinction events.

Beyond building spacecraft to fly there, he has also advocated extreme methods for making Mars more habitable for humans, including terraforming the planet by blasting it with nuclear weapons.

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