Under construction! Drone footage shows Elon Musk’s gaint stainless steel SpaceX Starship – which plans to take passengers and cargo to Mars – being built in the Florida sun
- Aerial footage shows SpaceX’s Starship prototypes are coming together
- Stainless steel bodies are in various stages of construction
- Progress corroborates a claim from Elon musk that a test flight is imminent
A birds-eye view of three of SpaceX’s glimmering Starship spacecraft shows that the vessels are slowly but surely coming together.
In aerial footage taken by videographer John Winkopp, the Starship craft’s shimmering stainless steel body can be seen taking ship at the company’s facility in Cocoa, Florida.
As reported by CNBC, the video also shows the first stainless steel bands of another Starship prototype, the Mark 4, being assembled.
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The progress gives credence to a claim from SpaceX CEO and Tesla founder, Elon Musk, who claimed that the next-generation craft will be ready for test flights between October and November.
An FCC filing surfaced in September that revealed SpaceX requested permission to fly Starship more than 12 miles into orbit and then land the craft back down in the same spot.
While SpaceX employee have been hard at work in Florida, a team in Texas has been concurrently building their own prototype.
The company is looking to build on a series of successful tests from Starhopper which most recently saw the craft hover more than 100 meters into the air and safely return to the launch platform.
Starship is expected to carryout commercial flights in orbit around 2021, with the goal of one day traveling to Mars. In September an FCC filing surfaced that revealed SpaceX is ready to launch into the next testing phase for its Starship
SpaceX hopes its style of reusable rocket will mark a major breakthrough in aerospace technology that will eventually make exploration cheaper and more sustainable.
Ultimately, Musk hopes that the company’s Starship could help humans reach Mars for the first time and has set an optimistic timeline for when the experimental craft might be able to do so.
The first crewed Red Planet mission for the rocket and 100-passenger Starship could come as early as the mid-2020s if development and testing go well, Musk has said
Additional missions may even include tourists trips to the moon by 2024, according to the CEO.
WHAT IS ELON MUSK’S ‘BFR’?
The BFR (Big F***ing Rocket), now known as Starship, will complete all missions and is smaller than the ones Musk announced in 2016.
The SpaceX CEO said the rocket would take its first trip to the red planet in 2022, carrying only cargo, followed by a manned mission in 2024 and claimed other SpaceX’s products would be ‘cannibalised’ to pay for it.
The rocket would be partially reusable and capable of flight directly from Earth to Mars.
Once built, Musk believes the rocket could be used for travel on Earth – saying that passengers would be able to get anywhere in under an hour.
