SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Monday said that he scrapped the idea of adding stainless steel “dragon wings” to Starship given their mass and complexity.
What Happened: Five years ago, on April 14, 2019, Musk wrote on social media platform X (then Twitter) that he was thinking about adding “giant stainless steel dragon wings” to Starship. Musk’s comment came on the heels of the premier of the eighth and final season of the popular television series Game of Thrones, leaving Twitter users wondering if the CEO was joking.
But Musk later clarified that he would rate his seriousness about the design idea at 6.5 on a scale of 1 to 10. Physics, the CEO said, would allow the design.
Musk on Monday said that while the design idea could indeed work, its mass and complexity are higher than a heat shield integral to protecting the vehicle from burning down. The billionaire entrepreneur was responding to an X user who wondered if he had contemplated the idea further in the five years since he first considered it.
Why It Matters: Musk is known to take design inspiration from movies and series for products manufactured by his companies including SpaceX. In an interview with Joe Rogan in 2021, Musk said he decided to make the Starship pointy instead of rounded at the top because of the movie “The Dictator.” Though the pointy design makes it “arguably slightly worse” aerodynamically, it “looks cooler,” Musk said.
The design of the Cybertruck, made by Musk’s EV company Tesla, is inspired by the 1982 cult sci-fi movie “Blade Runner.”
Starship is touted as the world’s most powerful launch vehicle with its 121-meter tall frame weighing approximately 5000 tonnes. It has undergone three flight tests thus far and is at the core of Musk’s dreams of taking humans back to the Moon and even Earth’s neighboring planet Mars.
During Starship's latest and third flight test on March 14, the spacecraft lost contact and broke down while re-entering the planet’s atmosphere instead of splashing down as planned in the Indian Ocean. The entirety of the last flight lasted about an hour.
For the next flight of Starship, the goal is to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere with all systems functioning despite the extreme heat, Musk said last month. Flight 4 is expected in May 2024.
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