Elon Musk Calls Orbital Refueling Starship's Next Challenge: 'I Specialize In The Impossible'

SpaceX and Tesla Inc. TSLA CEO Elon Musk thinks that orbital refilling of propellant on the Spacecraft is the next major milestone for the Starship rocket.

What Happened: Calling it one of the "hardest engineering challenges" that exists, Musk hailed the Starship rocket during the X takeover event on Sunday.

"I specialize in the impossible to merely late," Musk said, indicating that despite Starship's ambitious scale, the project was delayed but not scrapped. He also said that one of the hardest things is developing an orbital heat shield.

"No one has ever created a fully reusable orbital heat shield before and no one's created a fully reusable orbital rocket before," he said, emphasizing that creating a reusable heat shield remains a challenge for Starship.

Musk also said that developing a fully reusable rocket and booster would bring costs down, making it cheaper than a Falcon 1 rocket. The billionaire also highlighted that the next big challenge for the company is orbital refilling of the propellant.

"For orbital refilling, you need two Starships to come together and dock and transfer propellant," before adding that an "orbital propellant depot" could also be possible for SpaceX.

Why It Matters: The comments come as Musk had previously stated that he would share an update on the Starship project before the rocket's next launch, scheduled to take place in August.

Musk had also recently defended the company after President Donald Trump's comments on social media platform Truth Social about incentives and subsidies offered to the billionaire's companies. The government is also reportedly exploring other partners besides SpaceX for the $175 billion Golden Dome project.

Musk said that SpaceX won all NASA contracts "by doing a better job" than other companies for a fraction of the cost and that the subsidies Trump mentioned "did not exist," He said.

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