Elon Musk says SpaceX will try launching a full-size Starship prototype ‘later this week,’ and the rocket may fly 150 meters high – MSN Money

Loren Elliott/Getty Images A prototype of SpaceX's Starship, called Mk 1, rocket is seen at the company's South Texas launch facility in Boca Chica on September 28, 2019. Loren Elliott/Getty Images

Anyone who said grain silos can't fly may be in for a surprise later this week.

SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, is working feverishly to develop a potentially revolutionary rocket system called Starship in Boca Chica, a remote region in southeastern Texas that sits on the Gulf of Mexico. If Starship and its Super Heavy rocket booster end up being fully reusable, Musk has said, the system may reduce the cost of launching anything to space by about 1,000-fold.

But first, SpaceX has to see if its core designs for Starship works. To that end, the company is moving briskly to build, test, and launch prototypes. And according to Musk, the first such full-scale example may fly from a beachside launch site in a matter of days.

"Will attempt to fly later this week," Musk tweeted in response to a question about the status of a Starship prototype called SN5 (short for "serial number 5").

SN5 is the latest of several Starship prototypes that SpaceX has built in Texas. The previous versions have either crumpled during tests or, as was the case on May 29, catastrophically exploded. Each failure has taught SpaceX valuable lessons to inform design and material changes.

The steel vehicles don't have wing-like canards or nosecones attached in case something goes wrong in their earliest phases of testing, so they look more like flying fuel tanks or grain silos than rocket ships.

However, as last year's test launch of an early Starship prototype called Starhopper showed, the flights of such crude experimental vehicles (shown above) can easily impress: On August 27, Starhopper soared about 492 feet (150 meters) into the air, translated across a launch site, and landed on a nearby concrete pad.

The full-scale SN5 prototype may similarly soar nearly 500 feet (150 meters) in the air before attempting to land, according to regulatory documents released by the Federal Aviation Administration in September 2019, following an inquiry by Business Insider.

SpaceX on May 28 earned an FAA launch license to fly prototypes on a "suborbital trajectory," meaning the experimental spaceships could reach dozens of miles above Earth before returning and landing.

The company won't attempt such flights right off the bat, though. On Thursday, SpaceX asked the FCC for permission to use communicate with prototypes flying as high as 12.4 miles (20 kilometers) within the next seven months.

Nevertheless, SpaceX is pursuing a launch license for full-scale, orbital-class Starship-Super Heavy vehicles, part of which includes a new environmental review of its Boca Chica site.

Musk hopes Starship will launch a cargo mission to Mars in 2022, send a private crewaround the moonin 2023,return NASA astronautsto the lunar surface in 2024, and even beginsending people to Marsthe same year.

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Elon Musk says SpaceX will try launching a full-size Starship prototype 'later this week,' and the rocket may fly 150 meters high - MSN Money

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