ELON MUSK INTENDS TO SEND 100 PEOPLE TO MARS ON SPACEX STARSHIP
Friday, December 28, 2018 IST
Musk said he would give a detailed presentation of Starship after the prototype's test flight next year.
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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed
Musk also tweeted images of the prototype for SpaceX's Mars rocket 'Starship' standing tall and somewhat undressed at SpaceX's testing facility in Texas.
Once called the “Interplanetary Transport System,” then the "Mars Colonial Transporter", and later the longest-lasting of the lot: “Big Falcon Rocket”, the "Starship" spacecraft is Elon Musk's dreamboat that could ferry people to Mars in future missions.
And for all the cutting-edge technology SpaceX is invested in, Musk's image reveals an odd choice of material to build the most exotic of its space vessels: stainless steel.
The Starship is made of stainless steel, as Musk says in his tweet — a material that is capable of resisting heat well, and can even reflect heat with a generous coat of polish by giving it a shiny, reflective surface. This makes it a superior to the usual, carbon-fiber body.
But another thing that defines stainless steel is its weight — it's a heavy material and far heavier than carbon-fiber for a spacecraft.
Subsequent tweets and responses revealed that SpaceX was able to bypass this drawback of using stainless steel by treating it with cryogenic (very, very cold) temperatures. This, Musk tweeted, made the material more a better choice than carbon-fiber in terms of its strength by weight ratio for Starship.
Innovative use of kitchenware alloys and teasers of spacecrafts prototypes are cool, sure. But seeing the Starship fly is entirely another, and a treat that Musk said we can expect just months from now, in a tweet earlier last week.
Musk also tweeted that he would do a detailed "technical presentation of Starship" once the prototype's test flight was successful, which could be sometime in March or April of 2019.
If that presentation does see the light of day, we may see Musk don a proud grin that day. Starship is, after all, a vessel to bring his dream of making mankind an interplanetary species to life.
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