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By Kenneth Chang
Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, has said the company could land a spacecraft on Mars within three to four years.
The suggestion made by Musk was conveyed via video conference Thursday at the International Astronautical Congress in Azerbaijan, along with other information about the progress of Starship, a giant rocket being developed by SpaceX.
“I think it’s possible that in four years there could be an uncrewed test landing there,” Musk told Clay Mowry, president of the International Astronautical Federation, in an hour-long question-and-answer session.
Musk and SpaceX have a history of remarkable advances in spaceflight. This includes the scheduled landing and reuse of booster stages from SpaceX’s nine existing Falcon 9 rockets — the company has announced them 70 times this year alone.
But Musk has a track record: It took much longer than expected to reach his goals.
Musk first unveiled his rocket on Mars, and then an even larger rocket called the Interplanetary Transportation System, at a foreign astronautics congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2016. He predicted that SpaceX’s first uncrewed landing on the Red Planet would take place in 2022. It followed the first flight with other people on board in 2024.
So far, there was a verification flight of the Starship, in April, which caused it to leave the release pad before leaving and the order was given to fly the vehicle several minutes after its flight.
By the time Starship is ready, sir, but SpaceX is still waiting for the Federal Aviation Administration to consider a new launch license, in all likelihood as early as this month.
On Thursday, Musk explained some of the changes in the evolutionary design of the Starship. On the second flight, the engines on the second level will ignite before it separates from the propeller. The maneuver, known as “hot staging,” can be tricky.
“You’re exploding the maximum sensitivity of the propellant” with the second-stage engines, Mr. Musk. “It’s the most effective way from a physical standpoint. “
Musk no longer plans to send humans to Mars in 2024, but he has other technologically ambitious predictions for Starship next year. To achieve a quick response time between launches, SpaceX plans for the rocket’s Super Heavy booster to only return to its launch site, still floating on the ground as two arms of the release tower catch it in mid-flight. The same maneuver would be used for the starcraft’s upper level when it returns from orbit.
Musk said there’s “a good chance” of catching a propellant sometime next year and in all likelihood a spacecraft in orbit before the end of next year.
Musk also said SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink satellites could start operating next year on consumable versions of the Starship tier that were reused.
The verbal exchange between Mowry and Musk briefly addressed SpaceX’s key role in Artemis, NASA’s program to send astronauts back to the moon. An edition of Starship tries to take two NASA astronauts into orbit around the Moon to their landing in the South Pole region. the Artemis III mission.
“You’re making a lunar lander version, right?”Mowry.
Musk claimed this, but then said that building SpaceX for NASA would come with only minor modifications compared to a spacecraft designed to land on Mars.
Artemis III is recently scheduled for late 2025, but NASA officials have suggested that date will likely be pushed back to at least 2026.
A few months ago, James Free, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration systems progress, said NASA had obtained an updated timeline for the Starship’s progress and was reviewing it.
Without targeting SpaceX, Free said in August that if the entire generation wasn’t in a position to land, “we could end up doing another mission. “
Kenneth Chang has worked at The Times since 2000 and writes about physics, geology, chemistry and planets. Before becoming a science writer, he was a graduate student whose studies focused on controlling chaos. Learn more about Kenneth Chang
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