Three of SpaceX’s glimmering Starship spacecraft are seen coming together slowly in a birds-eye view video. The video by videographer John Winkopp shows the shimmering stainless steel body of the Starship craft being made at the company’s facility in Cocoa, Florida. It is also reported that the video shows the first stainless steel bands of a different prototype, the Mark 4 being assembled.
SpaceX CEO and Tesla founder, Elon Musk, who is credited for the progress of these Starship prototypes claimed that the next-generation craft will be ready for test flights by October and November. It is also revealed that an FCC filing that surfaced in September that showed SpaceX requested permission to fly the Starship more than 12 miles into orbit before it landed back on the same spot.
And though SpaceX employees are seen working super hard in Florida for the same, it is reported that a team in Texas has been parallelly building their own prototype. The company wants to build a series of successful tests from Starhopper after the recent craft was seen hovering more than 100 meters into the air and even successfully landed on the launch platform.
SpaceX is hoping that their style of the reusable rocket would make a major breakthrough in the aerospace technology and would thus make exploration cheaper and more sustainable. Musk’s dream with the help of Starship is to help humans reach Mars for the first time and he has also set an optimistic timeline by when his craft would do so. The first trip for the Red Planet would include 100-passenger and would come as soon as the mid-2020s if development and testing go well. It is also reported that other missions would include tourists’ trips to the moon by 2024.