Saturday, 12 September 2020_SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk announced the private aerospace company is beginning the construction of Starship's Super Heavy booster prototype later "this week" — a major step toward a mission to Mars.
"That's gonna be pretty cool," said Musk mid-keynote interview during the virtual Humans To Mars summit. He also unveiled plans to "hop" the new booster in the near future.
The Super Heavy will be the most powerful rocket booster ever constructed, by an astounding factor of two (or more), reports Teslarati. Easily taller than an entire two-stage Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy, the Super Heavy measures at roughly 230 ft (70 m) tall, and will weigh roughly 7.7 million lbs (3,500 metric tons) when filled with liquid oxygen and methane propellant.
Musk said SpaceX's target thrust capacity for the booster is roughly 16.5 lbf (7,500 tons) — substantially more than twice that of the Saturn V (of the Apollo missions) and the Soviet N-1 rockets, in addition to thrice the thrust of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket.
From an engineering viewpoint, while several times more powerful and bigger, the Super Heavy will technically be simpler than Falcon Heavy — since it uses a single core. Built from the same simple rings used to assemble Starship prototypes, the Super Heavy will likely also come at a lower cost to construct than Falcon Heavy.
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