For years now, Elon Musk has been feeding the imagination of space enthusiasts with images of a very near future when things one only saw in sci-fi movies are no longer promises or the result of imagination, but the reality of the world we live in.
Having contributed greatly to a massive change with his electric and still-fighting-to-be autonomous cars, Musk’s real dream seems to be to ensure a future for humanity among the stars. His SpaceX has already transformed the way orbital missions are flown, with the reusable Falcon boosters and the Dragon capsules, but the real prize is Mars.
We’re still a long way from getting there, and probably Musk’s dream of having humans on the surface of the Red Planet, not to mention a full colony there, will probably not come true in the mid-term future. But the foundations for that are being set now.
One of the ways we’ll get to Mars will probably be future iterations of what we now know as the Starship. The super-heavy rocket is scheduled to take its first orbital flight in the first few months of this year, marking the historic moment when a private company will have, for the first time, the capability of sending humans to the Moon and Mars.
Having concluded the many explosive trials of prototypes last year, SpaceX is now moving to the real test of the behemoth. We do not have a definitive date for the launch, but in anticipation of that moment, the company put together an animation showing us how the historic event will take place.
Portraying a nighttime launch, the animation (check the video below) looks like something we only get to see in sci-fi movies, with strips of light, clouds of steam, and the eventual ignition of the rocket’s engines.
We even get to see the Starship in orbit, the coronation of all the present efforts of SpaceX engineers, the return of the carrier rocket to its designated launch pad, and, at the end, the goal everyone over at SpaceX is aiming for: Starship’s arrival on Mars, where it descends (more of them, actually) onto existing human colonies.
We’re still a long way from getting there, and probably Musk’s dream of having humans on the surface of the Red Planet, not to mention a full colony there, will probably not come true in the mid-term future. But the foundations for that are being set now.
One of the ways we’ll get to Mars will probably be future iterations of what we now know as the Starship. The super-heavy rocket is scheduled to take its first orbital flight in the first few months of this year, marking the historic moment when a private company will have, for the first time, the capability of sending humans to the Moon and Mars.
Having concluded the many explosive trials of prototypes last year, SpaceX is now moving to the real test of the behemoth. We do not have a definitive date for the launch, but in anticipation of that moment, the company put together an animation showing us how the historic event will take place.
Portraying a nighttime launch, the animation (check the video below) looks like something we only get to see in sci-fi movies, with strips of light, clouds of steam, and the eventual ignition of the rocket’s engines.
We even get to see the Starship in orbit, the coronation of all the present efforts of SpaceX engineers, the return of the carrier rocket to its designated launch pad, and, at the end, the goal everyone over at SpaceX is aiming for: Starship’s arrival on Mars, where it descends (more of them, actually) onto existing human colonies.