According to Elon Musk, the future Starship will travel beyond the solar system
According to statements by Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, a future version of the Starship spacecraft, which conducted its third test flight last week, will travel to interstellar space. This he announced in his Twitter account.
Here's What We Know
Australian entrepreneur and investor Mario Nawfal posted a video on his Twitter account of the latest tests of the new Starship space rocket, captioning the video "SpaceX - the gateway to Mars... And possibly beyond." Elon Musk commented on the video saying that the Starship is designed to go beyond the solar system and that a future, larger and more advanced model of the Starship will be able to fly to other star systems.
The new Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, with a height (assembled) of 122 metres and a payload of 150 tonnes. This spacecraft performed quite well in a test flight last week, making serious progress compared to the first two flights that took place in April and November last year. The first test flight lasted 4 minutes, the second ended about 8 minutes after launch. And the third flight (14 March) lasted about 50 minutes and ended with the craft falling apart during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.
SpaceX reports that Starship will help humanity populate the Moon and Mars. NASA has also shared this position and now wants to use Starship as the first manned lunar landing module for its Artemis programme. If all goes according to plan, Starship will land astronauts on the Moon for the first time as part of the Artemis 3 mission, scheduled to launch in September 2026.
But getting astronauts to deep space will require quite a few more flight tests. And to create an interstellar version of the ship, a huge leap in technology is needed, which is still hard to imagine.
Mankind is not ready to create an interstellar ship, which would be able to travel between stars within reasonable time limits. The reason for this is the enormous distances involved. For example, the closest star to the Sun, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years away from us. That's about 40 trillion kilometres. A probe with a conventional rocket engine, would take tens of thousands of years to cover that distance.