Why Starship First Orbital Flight Is very very...very IMPORTANT For SpaceX?

SpaceX's huge Starship rocket for eventual trips to the Moon and Mars could go orbital for the first time just a few weeks from now if all goes according to Elon Musk's plan. Once this happens, this flight certainly will become the focal point of the whole world with thousands of newspapers and articles and other types of media reporting on the launch. But this isn't SpaceX's first rodeo as it has shocked the world many times before. Especially when it continuously created technical feats on which the space industry has given up. First, the consistent reuse of rockets with the Falcon 9. Second, the successful launch of a rocket with as many as 27 engines with the Falcon Heavy. And third, the first full-flow staged combustion engine which is the Raptor. That in turn also raises questions like why is this rocket launch so special and why Starship's first orbital flight is very important for SpaceX? Let's find out in today's episode of Great SpaceX. Starship, which is being built at a Texas site dubbed Starbase, consists of a giant spaceship on top of a large booster known as Super Heavy. Both can land back on Earth so they can be reused, reducing costs. The entire vehicle will be capable of lifting 100 metric tons of cargo and people into space on regular, low-cost missions. The volume of usable space within Starship is a whopping 1,000 cubic meters which is big enough to fit the entire Eiffel Tower, but only if it's disassembled. And that's obviously got us all excited. Last November, speaking in a publicly accessible virtual meeting about Starship hosted by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Musk discussed the project's scientific potential. Starship could carry a lot of scientific instrumentation on flights, as Musk said, far more than is currently possible. Central to many of these ideas is that Starship is designed to be not just large, but cheap to launch. Whereas agencies like NASA and the ESA must carefully choose a smattering of missions to fund, with launch costs in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, Starship's affordability could open the door to many more. With flights potentially as low as $2 million per launch, the low cost of access has the potential to really change the game for science research. You can imagine privately financed missions and consortia of citizens who got together to fly things. What's more, Starship has a key advantage over other super-heavy lift rockets in development such as NASA's much-delayed Space Launch System and Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket. The upper half of the rocket is designed to be refueled in Earth orbit by other Starships, so more of its lifting capability can be handed over to scientific equipment rather than fuel. Taking humans to the Moon, for example, might require eight separate launches with each consecutive tanker Starship bringing up fuel to the lunar Starship, which will then make its way to the Moon with scientific equipment and crew. That's why all of us are looking forward to the first orbital flight of SpaceX's Starship. For SpaceX, this flight will certainly mark a remarkable milestone in the development of the company. The orbital flight is the first time that SpaceX has produced a full-size prototype with two integrated parts. Together, Starship and Super Heavy will be nearly 120 meters tall when stacked for the launch. It's the largest monster on the planet that has ever been built. And according to the plan, Ship 24 and Super Heavy B7 will make the longest flight ever. It'll fly out of Earth's orbit, flying three-quarters of the way around the Earth. Because this is the longest flight, the flight time is the longest as well. This is a flight that is considered a new leap for SpaceX. Interestingly enough, the Starship's first orbital test flight, though audacious in scale, will have the task of providing a rich source of data for further trips in the future, especially Mars. SpaceX intends to collect as much data as possible during flight to quantify entry dynamics and better understand what the vehicle experiences in a flight regime that is extremely difficult to accurately predict or replicate computationally. This data will anchor any changes in vehicle design or CONOPs or concept of operations after the first flight and build better models for us to use in our internal simulations. What's more, this orbital flight will help SpaceX solidify its lead in the space race. Previously, people knew that SpaceX is famous for its Falcon 9, which is a partially reusable rocket that has saved a lot of money and time for the company with each launch. However, seeing some limitations that Falcon 9 could not bring to the company, they decided to bring another line of rockets, more powerful, larger in scale, and able to achieve the dream of bringing Elon Musk a return ticket to his planet, Mars. If Starship succeeds, SpaceX will further solidify its lead in the space race, becoming the first company to be able to build a fully reusable rocket, capable of carrying the largest payload, and able to conquer all space surfaces like the Moon, Mars, and beyond. At the same time, when its position has been proven, SpaceX will easily become a reliable partner of other space companies and organizations. And to follow up with that, they'll be making additional revenue from signed contracts. Dennis Tito, the first person to pay for his own ride into space, announced Wednesday that they purchased two of a dozen seats on the second of SpaceX's planned circumlunar flights later this decade. This brings the manifest of private human space flights on Starship and its Super Heavy rocket to three. There is billionaire Jared Isaacman's Polaris 3 mission, likely to low Earth orbit, which will be followed by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa's Dear Moon flight, the first human Starship flight around the Moon. Then will come Tito and the second circumlunar mission. SpaceX has also contracted with NASA to fly the first human landing on the Moon as part of the Artemis program. But for now, NASA astronauts will launch on a separate rocket and rendezvous with Starship in lunar orbit to go down to the lunar surface and back to orbit. Even the US military also has its own concepts for SpaceX rockets. The Air Force back in January awarded SpaceX $102 million to study using the spacecraft as a cargo ship that could deploy resources to various parts of the world in a matter of minutes or point-to-point transportation. The timeline for all of these missions hinges on the development of the Starship vehicle, which may make a debut orbital test flight in the coming months from South Texas. If successful, the massive spacecraft will open up unprecedented possibilities for space exploration. And that's really worth waiting for. Thank you so much for watching, and if you enjoy what my team and I are doing, you can become a patron through our Patreon link in the description below. Otherwise, as always, this is Kevin with GreatSpaceX, and my team and I will see you next time.