Goals for Starship? This spacecraft could take humans to the moon and Mars
SpaceX — and NASA — have huge goals for this rocket.
NASA wants to use Starship to carry out the final leg of the journey to put astronauts back on the moon for the first time in five decades as part of its Artemis program. The space agency gave SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract in 2021 to get the job done, and it inked another $1 billion deal after that.
Starship is also the linchpin of SpaceX’s goal of getting humans to Mars. The company’s founding purpose is to make humans a multi-planetary species, sending them to live on other planets in case Earth becomes unsuitable for life.
That task would require a truly massive rocket.
“We are trying to build something that is capable of creating a permanent base on the moon and a city on Mars — that’s why it is so large,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said last year.
Whether that goal is feasible — economically, technologically and politically — remains to be seen. But Musk and SpaceX have garnered a diehard fanbase rallied around the idea.
Here are some other items on the agenda for Starship:
- Send paying customers (or space tourists) on trips to deep space: At least one customer — billionaire Jared Isaacman, who is spearheading a development program alongside SpaceX — has already signed up.
- Launch batches of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, which beam internet service across the globe
- Potentially launch new scientific instruments, such as space-based telescopes
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