An important contribution to the future of space engineering came on Wednesday when the US Fish and Wildlife Service gave their thumbs-up to the launch of SpaceX Starship IFT-2, which blasted off from Texas on Saturday. The IFT-2 is one of the largest, most powerful spaceships ever made, and completed its launch following a failed run this April (this time the ‘ship’ completed its initial launch phase though the booster rocket exploded and the ship was destroyed). Many readers will know that the Starship is ‘re-useable’ in that the ‘ship’ element can slow horizontally and then flip to perform a vertical landing.
Starship has all of the elements we now readily associate with Elon Musk – disruptive genius, oodles of capital and a tense relationship with government – Starship will ferry satellites to space (Starlink satellites will account for about 40% of Space X revenues) and is also intended to taxi astronauts to the moon, and eventually Mars, and in so doing it creates a dependency of NASA and to an extent, the US military on it.
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