SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday envisioned his company enabling a space station on the moon on the heels of a NASA announcement that it has selected the company to develop a vehicle to deorbit the International Space Station (ISS).
What Happened: The ISS, which was launched in 1998, is projected to be decommissioned by 2030. NASA on Wednesday announced that it has selected SpaceX to develop the spacecraft to deorbit the space station. SpaceX will be responsible for building the vehicle, but NASA will oversee the mission, it said.
While SpaceX will indeed be part of the deorbiting of the space station, it will also be part of enabling a space station on the Moon, Musk said on Wednesday following the announcement.
“The Moon Station that Starship will enable will be great,” Musk wrote.
Musk in January said that the company would consider building stations on both the Moon and Mars. However, Musk’s plans for Mars don’t end at a space station. The CEO has previously envisioned building a self-sustaining city on Mars by delivering a sufficient payload to the planet with its Starship.
Why It Matters: SpaceX has held four flight tests of the Starship to date. On the latest test flight on June 6, the two stages of the vehicle – the Starship spacecraft and the Super Heavy booster- separated and the booster subsequently had a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
The spacecraft ignited its engines and went on to space, made a controlled re-entry to Earth, and had a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean. The entire flight lasted one hour and six minutes from launch.
The key objective of the flight was to re-enter Earth and the mission achieved it. However, it lost many hexagonal heat-shield tiles designed to protect against the extreme heat of reentry to Earth’s atmosphere in the process.
SpaceX is expected to have at least six flights of the Starship this year, as per CEO Elon Musk‘s latest estimate from March. NASA is currently relying on the success of Starship to land humans back on the moon. The last crewed lunar mission occurred in 1972 with Apollo 17. Since then, no crew has traveled beyond low-Earth orbit.
SpaceX, meanwhile, is aiming to land humans on Mars aboard the launch vehicle which stands 121 meters tall and weighs about 5,000 tonnes.
In addition to deorbiting the ISS, SpaceX is also expected to launch Vast‘s Haven-1, scheduled to be the world's first commercial space station, no earlier than 2025.
The company is also expected to launch the Starlab commercial space station to low Earth orbit by 2028. Starlab is being designed by Starlab Space, a joint venture between Voyager Space, Airbus, and Mitsubishi Corporation.
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