Elon Musk hopes to send Starship into orbit in May

  Orbital tests of a new generation of spacecraft, which the private company SpaceX is building in Texas, may take place in May. As Elon Musk tweeted, the Raptor engines will be ready in April, it will take another month to install and debug them, after which the Super Heavy launch vehicle will be able to take off into space for the first time.

“We will have 39 flight-able Raptor engines next month, then another month for integration, so there is hope for a test flight in May,” Musk wrote in response to a question from CNBC.

Starship is a nearly 120-meter reusable spacecraft that SpaceX has been developing for several years and which is going to deliver cargo anywhere on the Earth, into orbit, the Moon and Mars. In February, Elon Musk held a presentation at the Starbase test site in Texas, where he spoke about the test schedule and difficulties, and also promised to reduce the cost of launching a heavy rocket with a payload capacity of 100 tons to $10 million, that is, to $100 per kilogram.

The company completed a cycle of high-altitude flight tests, which used prototypes of the ship, but had to postpone the next important stage. The orbital flight was supposed to take place last year but was postponed for several months. One reason is the lack of final approval to launch super-heavy rockets from the current spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas. The Federal Aviation Administration promised to give an answer at the end of March.

Another hurdle that the company had to overcome in order to begin orbital testing was of a production nature and related to the Raptor closed-type liquid engines. This became known in the fall of 2021 from a letter that Musk sent to SpaceX employees. In it, he asks to show loyalty to the company and accomplish a labor feat, otherwise SpaceX “faces a real danger of bankruptcy.”

China also has a project for a two-stage super-heavy spacecraft, reminiscent of Starship. However, while Starship and Super Heavy are being developed with a payload capacity of 100 tons, the Chinese system will take on board five times less - about 20 tons. This is apparently explained by the use of a gas generator engine.