Musk's next ship will travel among the stars

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said he remains fully committed to taking humanity to Mars.

in Publishing Recently on his X-Twitter profile, Musk reiterated that his giant SpaceX spacecraft “is designed to cross our entire solar system and go beyond, into the cloud of stuff that surrounds us.”

Maybe musk refers to Oort cloudThe giant spherical shell of comets surrounding the solar system.

“A futuristic spacecraft, much larger and more advanced“It will travel to other star systems,” writes the airline's CEO, adding an even bigger and more ambitious step to his already grandiose vision.

Step by step, Musk has been able to achieve (or continue to achieve) the dream of advancing humanity in his space adventure, but SpaceX still faces enormous challenges before reaching the stars.

This week, SpaceX successfully carried out the third orbital launch of Starship, this time reaching an altitude of 233 kilometers and crossing the African continent, before spiraling out of control into the Indian Ocean.

Despite the anti-climatic ending, a release was considered Great successOn the occasion of A A new milestone for the space company In its efforts to develop a super-heavy launch platform.

For Musk, the stainless steel rocket It is humanity's ticket To become Interplanetary species long-term.

Naturally, the unpredictable CEO used this week's launch as an opportunity to offer some distinctly ambitious — and perhaps overly — timelines. “The spacecraft will reach Mars in 5 years“, guaranteed musk.

To put this timeline in perspective, NASA's Artemis 3 mission, which… You will take the spacecraft with the astronauts Landing on the moon again, originally scheduled for 2025, but was postponed to 2026, he recalls. Byte.

That is, before the spacecraft can “traverse our entire solar system and beyond,” SpaceX said We still have a lot to prove.

First off, Musk's remarkable ship still needs to be completed Reliably entering orbit and returning to Earth completeThis is easier said than done, and it has not yet been implemented.

Moreover, the company must prove this The spacecraft can refuel Another while in Earth orbit, it must create a file Life support system For longer journeys across the solar system, and still find a way to do so Enough fuel to reach the destination sperm.

If it were up to Musk, future rocket developments would be able to span the globe 4.2 light-years to the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri. But with current technology, covering such a distance would take approx 6300 years terrestrial.

In other words, humanity Maybe I'll have to hibernate (something that seems close to happening) or Breed on board To reach another star system.

Except, of course, if SpaceX finds a way to bypass the laws of physics as we know them, and… Traveling at the speed of light – With something like a warp drive, which NASA is working on To fall in love years ago, but this remains a possibility for now Too far.

Elon Musk is a visionary of bold statements about impossible things that he then manages to achieve, but whether this time he will truly take humanity beyond the planet he was born on is something that is still only written in the stars.