The Starship gets fully stacked today for its maiden voyage. Starship is the world’s first and only fully reusable orbital rocket. It’s also the largest, with ~2x the thrust of the prior heavyweight champion, the Saturn V of Apollo.
120m (392 ft.) tall, like a skyscraper. The scale is breathtaking. There are people on the top of the white lifts in the last photo. Elon Musk: “There is a reason no fully reusable orbital rocket has been built – it’s an insanely hard problem. Moreover, it must be rapidly & completely reusable (like an airplane). This is the only way to make life multiplanetary.” And guess what, the Mechazilla launch pad infrastructure is more complicated than any rocket SpaceX has built. The Super Heavy booster flies back to the pad to be caught by the Mechazilla tower arms, like a pair of chopsticks catching grasshopper.
Elon recently did an extended interview on premise with Everyday Astronaut. Here is a good section laying out his engineering management philosophy: https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=812
Leave a Reply