SpaceX’s planned Mars rocket has a new name: Starship.
Or at least the spacecraft element of the rocket does. The booster, SpaceX boss Elon Musk announced Tuesday via his mother tongue of Twitter, is now called “Super Heavy”.
Technically, two parts: Starship is the spaceship/upper stage & Super Heavy is the rocket booster needed to escape Earth’s deep gravity well (not needed for other planets or moons)
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2018
Technically, two parts: Starship is the spaceship/upper stage & Super Heavy is the rocket booster needed to escape Earth’s deep gravity well (not needed for other planets or moons)
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2018
The previous codename, BFR, officially stood for “Big Falcon Rocket” — Falcon being the common name of SpaceX’s previous and current rockets — although Musk also said it could be taken to represent “Big F—ing Rocket.”
As Musk put it earlier this year, it was “a bit of a Rorschach test in acronym form.”
A lot of SpaceX’s ambition is riding on the as-yet-unbuilt Starship. It won’t only be used for the company’s much-vaunted mission to Mars, but also to take tourists around the Moon — Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa is first in line — and possibly to make very speedy Earth-to-Earth journeys as well.
The Starship rocket is supposed to enter testing next year. It will be around 348 feet tall and have a diameter of around 30 feet. Musk also claims the spacecraft will be able to carry 100 people in 40 cabins.