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September 30, 2019 06:20 pm

SpaceX Has Starry-Eyed Ambitions for Its Starship

Elon Musk has laid out an ambitious future for his spaceship project, the effort to deliver people to the moon and Mars. Marina Koren, writing for The Atlantic: The whole thing felt like an Apple event. The weeks of anticipation and breathless guesses from fans and critics. Onstage, the greatest-hits reel highlighting the company's beloved products over the years. A grand walk-through of the next product's features: the sleek design, the impressive specs, simulations of how it's going to work. A man with a mic, both salesman and visionary, looking out at the crowd. It is strange to compare the unveiling of a spaceship to the annual release of a smartphone, but this is the reality Elon Musk has conjured with SpaceX, and in a relatively short amount of time. Musk gave a talk about SpaceX's prototype spaceship, Starship, on Saturday night in Boca Chica, Texas, a small coastal town not far from the U.S.-Mexico border, which SpaceX picked to house this ambitious project just a few years ago. The vessel, roomy enough to fit 100 passengers, will be shot into orbit by a massive, reusable rocket, which the company is also building and which could be as powerful as the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo astronauts. Starship has multiple missions; it is supposed to shuttle people on swift journeys to different cities on Earth, as well as carry them on long-haul flights to the moon and Mars. The event came 11 years after SpaceX reached orbit for the first time with the earliest version of its Falcon rockets. Since then, the company has flown rockets to orbit over and over again, then landed the accompanying boosters upright on the ground and reused them, an industry first for orbital missions. The company has launched commercial satellites, government spy missions, and cargo to the International Space Station. It shot a Tesla toward Mars and sprinkled internet satellites around Earth. Musk founded SpaceX to someday send people to Mars, and he has said for years that he will make space travel as easy as hopping on a plane. As he stood in front of a gleaming steel spaceship, it was tempting to start believing him. "It's really gonna be pretty epic to see that thing take off and come back," Musk said.

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