BOCA CHICA, TEXAS — With SpaceX preparing to launch its Starship on top of its massive Super Heavy rocket for the first time next month, scientists are getting excited about how such a cavernous spaceship will make the impossible possible.
Here are the details: With SpaceX ready to test launch its Starship next month, the MIT Technology Review interviewed leading space scientists and found that the spaceship will dramatically change the things humans can achieve in space.
Starship has a whopping 1,000 cubic meters of usable internal space, making it big enough to fit the entire Eiffel Tower, disassembled.
It can also push more than 100 metric tonnes of payload into space.
This means that humans can soon carry full-sized equipment from Earth without the need to miniaturize it.
For example, you could take a full-sized drilling rig to another planet and drill down a kilometer.
That would give previously unimaginable access to the interior of the moon and Mars, where ice and other resources are thought to be present.
Humans would also be able to take a lot of scientific instrumentation on flights, compared to sending small vehicles with limited instrumentation.
The best part is that SpaceX says all these volume advantages can be achieved at the incredibly low price of $2 million per launch, because the booster and spaceship are designed to return to Earth for reuse.
Among the many other advantages of such a big space vehicle is the delivery of bigger telescopes into space.
Currently, these have to be folded into small cargo bays, after which they have to unfold autonomously in space, which adds a lot of cost, complexity and risk of failure.