SpaceX owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk impersonates he shows up on the red carpet for the Axel Springer Awards event, in Berlin, on December 1, 2020.
Britta Pedersen | AFP | Getty Images
Elon Musk believes SpaceX can assist NASA satisfy its enthusiastic objective of landing astronauts on the moon by 2024.
“I think that can be done,” Musk stated Friday, speaking after SpaceX introduced the Crew-2 objective to orbit for a journey to the International Space Station.
“We’re going to aim for sooner than that, but I think this is actually doable,” he included. “We’re structure up a great deal of rockets, and most likely [will] smash a lot of them, however I believe it will take place.”
SpaceX won a $2.9 billion agreement from NASA recently under the firm’s Human Landing Systems program.
Starship model rocket SN11 bases on the launchpad at the business’s center in Boca Chica, Texas.
SpaceX
Under the agreement, Musk’s business will develop a variation of its Starship rocket, models of which SpaceX has actually been evaluating in Boca Chica, Texas. The business has actually carried out numerous effective test flights of Starship, although landing efforts after the last 4 high-altitude flights ended in intense surges.
NASA’s Artemis program, revealed by President Donald Trump’s administration and anticipated to continue under President Joe Biden, includes numerous objectives to the moon’s orbit and surface area in the years ahead.
Musk stated “it’s a great honor to be chosen by NASA to return people to the moon,” highlighting his business’s vision for flying routine flights there and beyond.
“It’s been now almost half a century since humans were last on the moon. That’s too long, we need to get back there and have a permanent base on the moon — again, like a big permanently occupied base on the moon. And then build a city on Mars to become a spacefaring civilization, a multiplanet species,” Musk stated. “We don’t want to be one of those single-planet species, we want to be a multiplanet species”
Musk has actually formerly approximated that it will cost about $5 billion to completely establish Starship, although SpaceX has actually not revealed just how much it has actually invested in the program. On Friday, Musk kept in mind that the Human Landing Systems agreement win is “really helpful,” as Starship advancement has “mostly been funded internally thus far and it’s pretty expensive.”
“It’s a tough vehicle to build because we’re trying to crack this nut of a rapid and fully reusable rocket,” Musk stated. “But the thing that’s really important to revolutionize space is a rapidly reusable rocket that’s reliable, too.”
