You can watch a live stream of the update on the progress of the new Starship rocket by the billionaire founder of the company, Musk.
Musk will speak at 6 pm. During a 30-minute presentation for the National Academies' Space Studies Board and Board of Physics and Astronomy. The boards are meeting this week to discuss a wide range of projects.
You can watch Musk's talk at the top of the page or on the National Academies' website.
The video shows the test-fire of 6 Raptor engines.
The first test-fire of six Raptor engines on the company's Starship SN20 rocket prototype was shown in a photo. A booster is at the right. The image is from the SpaceX.
The Super Heavy booster is designed to be a fully re-usable launch system for deep-space missions to the moon, Mars or elsewhere in the solar system. In 2016 Musk first unveiled plans for the Interplanetary Transport System and later the Big Falcon Rocket and has issued updates on its design over the years leading up to a series of suborbital test flights earlier this year.
The current prototype, called Starship SN20, test-fired its six Raptor engines last week at the Starbase facility in South Texas in a step towards its first orbital flight. The Starbase facility is located on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and the FAA has to complete an environmental review before the test flight can launch. FAA officials said that the review should be finished by the end of the year.
Regulatory approval is the limiting factor for the first launch. The fundamental issue is solving engine production, according to Musk. Production is hard.
The world's tallest rocket is by SpaceX.
The Starship is powered by six engines. The entire rocket is 395 feet tall when stacked atop its Super Heavy booster. That's taller than NASA's moon rocket, which stood at over 300 feet.
The vehicle that NASA will use to land astronauts on the moon in the near future is the one that was picked by the agency. Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese businessman, bought a trip around the moon from the company.
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