Elon Musk’s Starship ‘Mars rocket’ to launch next test mission in days as US rushes to beat China to Red Planet
SPACEX’S Starship is preparing for its seventh test flight next week, which will see the rocket attempt to deploy fake satellites in space.
It will be the first time the rocket has ejected payloads in orbit.
10 mock satellites that are a similar size and weight to SpaceX’s Starlink satellites have been crafted for the mission.
In a recent mission statement, SpaceX added that Super Heavy, the part of the rocket that gets Starship off the ground, will sport reused hardware for the first time.
It will use a Raptor engine from the booster that was launched and returned during Starship’s fifth flight test.
Lift off is scheduled for 13 January at 5pm EST / 10pm GMT from Starbase, in Boca Chica, Texas.
Starship has flown six times to date – twice in 2023 and in March, June, October and November of last year.
The October mission broke new ground when the booster – instead of falling to the ground – was caught midair in a “chopsticks maneuver” by mechanical arms on the launchpad.
The feat had never been done before, and is expected to be repeated in Flight 7.
Meanwhile, Starship’s 165-foot-tall upper stage, known as Starship, will splashdown in the Indian Ocean, as it did on its three most recent launches.
If all goes to plan, the launch will occur just three days after the first test flight of New Glenn, the first orbital rocket from Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin.
The 33-engine, nearly 400-foot-tall, rocket is the largest vehicle to have ever left the ground.
SpaceX owner Elon Musk has grand plans to turn Starship into the rocket that makes humans an interplanetary species.
In September, Musk, currently the richest man in the world, claimed the rocket would undergo crewed flights to Mars in as little as four years’ time.
Starship has been designed to be the vehicle that makes humans interplanetary, and house up to 100 people.
It is expected to take humans to the Moon through Nasa’s Artemis mission in mid-2027, and eventually to Mars.
China has been making increasingly firm announcements regarding its own launch plans for the Red Planet.
In November, a new study suggested China leave for Mars and return to Earth with samples of Martian soil roughly two years ahead of Nasa and the European Space Agency (ESA).
Similar to its plans for the Moon, China intends to send its first crew to Mars and set up a base for regular crewed missions in 2033, 2035, 2037, and 2041.
ANALYSIS: Are we in a new space race?
By Millie Turner, Senior Technology & Science Reporter
Visions of humans on the Moon once more has sparked a renaissance for the space race of the 1960s.
While China has replaced the Soviet Union in this iteration, it is once again the US going toe-to-toe with whichever global superpower is brazen enough for the challenge.
The pair are already locked into an Earth-bound tech war, with fist-shaking over computer chips, AI and TikTok, which has somehow erupted into a race for the stars.
Nasa boss Bill Nelson hasn’t shied away from calling it a “race”, either.
Under President Xi Jinping, China spent roughly $14billion (11.2billion) on its ambitious space programme in 2023, according to Statista.
The US space agency has dominated the industry so far, though has only recently swallowed the bitter pill of scrapping the Viper Moon mission after $450million had already been spent, citing spiralling costs and delays.
Nasa’s own Mars Sample Return has also been subject to pushbacks, as the mission timeline falls back into the 2040s from its original 2028 launch date.
China’s knack for building things fast, and well, could tip the scales – effects of which we might be seeing in real-time, as the country looks set to beat Nasa to Mars.
Though I have no doubt that date will be revised at some point in the future.