Elon Musk offers updates on the development of SpaceX's Starship rocket project during the International Astronautical Congress in Baku via Video Links on Thursday, which includes his aspirations to land on Mars in the coming years.
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The most fundamental difference of Starship is that it is designed to be fully reusable
with both the booster and the ship or the both the first and second stage
being are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable so that so
for a truly profound revolution in massed orbit you have to have I call it
uh with the four the four r's rapidly reusable reliable rockets
I love like a pirate give me an r
all right so what does what does success look like for this uh flight number two what does
success look like for you what are you trying to achieve um well I don't want to set expectations
well not too high um so there's there's there's a tremendous amount of new technology in this
rocket um we are we have actually changed the entire stage separation system from
um uh something that was uh I'm not sure how to describe this but but but um
kind of a a uh just just a rotation and flip we're trying we're trying to we're trying to
move to a passive stage subsystem where you don't have pushers essentially um in the to try
to eliminate parts um there's no pushes no interstage like Falcon 9 has um and uh
with with with flight two we're actually trying to um hot staging um so so hot staging would mean
that we light the the ship or upper stage engines uh while the boost engines are still partially
thrusting so we throttle down and shut down most of the booster engines then we light the
the ship engines and there's there's a bent area which looks comically small um actually
which hopefully is not because you're you're essentially blasting the top of the booster
with the ship um uh now this is actually uh from a physics standpoint the most efficient way to do
stage separation and the soviets uh and later the russians made extensive use of um of hot staging
and but of course this is the first time we're doing it so
i would say that's that's the riskiest part of the flight for flight two
um and if if the engine's light and the ship uh doesn't blow itself up during stage stuff
then i think we've got a decent chance of reaching orbit so how many more test flights are coming up
and when do you think you're going to try to catch starship on a tower with without giant mechazilla
yes so talking about mars any new predictions on when you i know this is your ultimate goal
your destination uh any predictions on when starship might land on mars without crew maybe
a crewed flight any uh any prediction there well i think three or four years four years
yeah something like all right um i have to check with the earth mars uh you know earth mars uh
the you know um get have orbital synchronization about every 26 months um so you can't just go
fly to mars when it's on the other side of the sun um from earth uh that's uh unwieldy so
roughly every 26 months the orbits um are in the right relative position um and then you
then you have the mars transport window um so i i think you know but i think it's sort of feasible
within the next four years um to do an uncrewed test test landing there yeah
