Elon Musk’s SpaceX stacked a Starship prototype rocket on top of a Super Heavy rocket booster for the first time Friday morning, giving a look at the scale of the combined nearly 400-foot-tall vehicle.
Ikeanumba unveiled a tweet where Elon Musk was asked what he thought of witnessing the milestone at the company’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas, responded simply.
“Dream come true,” Musk replied.
SpaceX is developing Starship to launch cargo and people on missions to the moon and Mars. Starship prototypes stand at about 160 feet tall, or around the size of a 16-story building, and are built of stainless steel — representing the early version of the rocket that Musk unveiled in 2019.
The rocket lifts off on top of a Super Heavy booster, which makes up the bottom half of the rocket and stands about 230 feet tall. Together, Starship and Super Heavy are nearly 400 feet tall when stacked for launch.
The 230-foot-tall (70 meters) Booster 4 will soon go through a series of pressurization and engine tests. Providing Booster 4 passes the trials, the rocket will then be prepared to send SN20 on a round-the-world trip. But it’s unclear when the rocket will launch, given that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is performing an environmental review of Starship’s launch operations, and we don’t know when that will finish.
The orbital flight plan calls for Booster 4 to splash down in the Gulf of Mexico, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) offshore, a few minutes after launch. SN20 will continue into orbit, make one circuit of Earth and then come down in the Pacific Ocean roughly 90 minutes after liftoff, near the Hawaiian island of Kauai.
NASA recently selected Starship as the crewed lander for its Artemis program, which plans to put humans on the moon later in the 2020s. Starship is a fully reusable, two-stage transportation system that SpaceX plans to use to ferry cargo and people to the moon, Mars and other destinations in the solar system.
SN20 (which is short for “Serial No. 20”) is the latest in a series of prototype launches for the Starship series. For example, a three-engine vehicle known as SN15 flew to a maximum altitude of 6.2 miles (10 km) in May and came down for a safe landing back on Earth.
The final version of the Starship spacecraft will have six Raptor engines, and the final Super Heavy version will likely be powered by 32 Raptor engines, Musk has said. The upper stage is 165 feet (50 meters) tall and is also known, confusingly, as Starship.
