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Gaze Upon SpaceX’s Steely Starship Prototype

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Starship Mk1 at SpaceX's launch facility in Texas (via SpaceX)

SpaceX unveiled its new Starship rocket: A stainless steel torpedo designed to haul a crew and cargo into outer space and back again.

On the 11th anniversary of the company’s first successful mission, CEO Elon Musk showed off the firm’s new project.

The Mk1 prototype—a long-duration spacecraft capable of carrying humans to the Moon, Mars, and beyond—is an impressive 164 feet high and 30 feet in diameter.

“This is, I think, the most inspiring thing that I’ve ever seen,” Musk said of the giant mirrored ship, expected to set sail before the end of this year.

In a live-streamed speech from Boca Chica, Texas, the entrepreneur announced a quick turnaround for Starship: The prototype will take its first suborbital test flight within two months.

“This thing is going to take off, fly to 65,000 feet … and come back and land in about one to two months,” Musk boasted during an hour-long presentation over the weekend.

A competing SpaceX team at Cape Canaveral, Fl., meanwhile, will conduct a similar test with the Mk2 as soon as November. Mk3 is scheduled to start construction in October and fly in December, while Mk4 could come in January.

“I have this mantra: If the schedule’s long, it’s wrong; if it’s tight, it’s right,” Musk said. “If the design takes a long time to build, it’s the wrong design.”

His definition of “a long time” remains unclear. But SpaceX completed Starship Mk1 in fewer than five months, if that’s any indication.

“We are going to be building ships and boosters … as fast as we can. We’re improving both the design and the manufacturing method exponentially,” Musk added.

Production for the Super Heavy booster won’t start until Mk4 is complete.

A final version of the rocket will have the capacity to lug more than 220,000 lbs. to orbit, making it about as powerful as the Saturn 5 rocket that took NASA astronauts to the Moon 50 years ago, The New York Times pointed out.

Starship, however, will be able to fly again. And again and again and again.

“Almost any mode of transport—whether it’s a plane, a car, a horse, a bicycle—is reusable,” Musk mused. “The critical breakthrough that’s necessary [for commercial space travel] is a rapidly reusable orbital rocket.

“This is basically the holy grail of space,” he said of the SpaceX Starship. “It is a very hard thing to do. It’s only barely possible with the physics of Earth.”

The laws of gravity won’t stop Musk, though.

Earlier this month, he teased photos of the spacecraft, which follows the Starhopper—SpaceX’s first Starship prototype that aced a major hover test in August.

“There are many troubles in the world, of course. And these are important and we need to solve them,” Musk said. “But we also need things that make us excited to be alive. That make us glad to wake up in the mornings and be fired up about the future. … Space exploration is one of those things.”

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