San Francisco: SpaceX is all set to attempt the debut launch of the next generation Starship on Monday. However, CEO Elon Musk has lowered expectations for the inaugural launch.
Starship is currently sitting on a launch pad at the company’s facilities on the southern Texas coastline. The launch is targeted at 8 a.m. CT (6.30 p.m. IST) on Monday.
“I guess I’d like to just set expectations low,” Elon Musk said during a Twitter ‘Spaces’ event for his subscribers on Sunday.
“If we get far enough away from the launch pad before something goes wrong, then I think I would consider that to be a success. Just don’t blow up the pad.”
“There’s a good chance that it gets postponed since we’re going to be pretty careful about this launch,” he added.
Musk had previously said that there is only a 50 per cent chance that the first-ever orbital mission of SpaceX’s huge Starship vehicle will be a success. But he also stressed that SpaceX is building multiple Starship vehicles at the South Texas site.
These will be launched in relatively quick succession over the coming months, and there’s about an 80 per cent chance one of them will reach orbit this year.
The test flight will be SpaceX’s first attempt to launch a fully assembled Starship vehicle, building on a years-long testing campaign.
It will not complete a full orbit around Earth. If successful, however, it will travel about 150 miles above Earth’s surface, well into altitudes deemed to be outer space.
“With a test such as this, success is measured by how much we can learn, which will inform and improve the probability of success in the future as SpaceX rapidly advances development of Starship,” the company wrote on its website.
Starship is a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, help humanity return to the Moon, and travel to Mars and beyond.
It consists of a giant first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 50 metres upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship. Both stainless-steel vehicles are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, and both are powered by SpaceX’s next-gen Raptor engine — 33 for Super Heavy and six for Starship.
