Technology
Elon Musk renames SpaceX Big Falcon Rocket to Starship
SpaceX has long been touting a rocket in the works that wants to
be the first to put people on Mars, and all that hype now comes
with a new name.
Elon Musk, the company’s CEO, took to
Twitter late Monday night to reveal the new name of the
387-foot SpaceX rocket. Up until now, the rocket has been
operating under the name Big Falcon Rocket — dubbed BFR, and
also referred to by many (including Musk) as the “Big F—–g
Rocket.”
But now, the rocket is named Starship.
The spacecraft technically consists of two parts: the spaceship
that holds people and cargo, called Starship, and the booster
that launches the rocket to Mars, called Super Heavy.
Technically, two parts: Starship is the spaceship/upper stage & Super Heavy is the rocket booster needed to escape Earth’s deep gravity well (not needed for other planets or moons)
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2018
SpaceX’s BFR project
has made headlines for what Musk sees as the rocket’s end
goal: to eventually bring humans to Mars. Last month, Musk said
in an interview that SpaceX is
eyeing 2024 for the launch.
Final designs for the rocket,
released in September, present a fully reusable booster and
fully reusable spaceship,
designed to hold 100 people or 150 tons of cargo. Musk
estimates the rocket will cost between $2 billion and $10 billion
to create.
To help understand the magnitude of what Musk and his thousands
of employees at SpaceX are trying to accomplish, Business Insider
created an interactive size-comparison graphic.
Next to the rendering of the rocket shown below, you’ll see a
series of familiar objects at the rocket’s base. (Some are so
small that you may have to scroll down a bit.) Toggle through the
20 comparisons by clicking “next” or “back” to get a sense of the
rocket’s scale:
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