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The staging might be called simple if there weren’t a multi-million dollar space rocket mounted on its platform behind the scenes. In Boca Chica, in the south of the state of Texas (United States), Elon Musk has set up his own “Cape Canaveral”. It was in that flat territory attached to the coast and close to the Gulf of Mexico where he spoke, among other things, regarding the ship with which his company SpaceX plans to transport human beings to Mars. In addition, it is considered that this rocket will be key to the Artemis program with which NASA restarted its space race to reposition the United States as the country that set foot on the Moon once more. An interesting and also marketing project taking into account the economic issues left by the coronavirus pandemic and that motivated Joe Biden’s trillion-dollar plan to achieve a reactivation. Likewise, according to Elon Musk, NASA consumes 0.36% of the annual budget of the United States. Very little, according to his point of view, taking into account that it is regarding thinking regarding the life of our children and grandchildren on a planet Earth with a complicated future.
Destiny, Mars. Anyway, for Elon Musk the sky is not the limit and the evidence has already gone from plans to concrete facts. Late Thursday followingnoon, he climbed onto the aforementioned stage alone, the rocket behind lit only at the start, two side screens, a visible custodian, and an audience of guests and many of the troupe conveying similar enthusiasm to the watching Tim Cook presenting a new Apple product. Musk didn’t have the effusiveness of a television pastor – thankfully – although that was the initial impression until he started talking. With a neutral but sure tone, the first part of his speech might well have been used by Leonardo Di Caprio in his characterization of Doctor Randall Mindy, in the movie Don’t look up. The richest man in the world began with a question: Why create a multiplanetary life? “Something bad can happen to planet Earth, in fact there are no longer dinosaurs going around the world. Added to the calamities humanity inflicts on itself is the possibility of natural disasters,” Musk said. “I am an optimistic person and maybe that is why I think there is zero probability that all this will happen. But in a few million years, the sun will expand making it impossible to breathe on Earth and will destroy human life. We are guardians of life, stewards of nature. And that makes us multiplanetary beings: we are the only ones who can build spaceships, animals cannot, but we can take them with us. This is important for those of us who care regarding the environment and all who inhabit it. (…) Transforming what is called science fiction into something real is what today drives me to continue more than anything else”.
challenges. A city on Mars is the wish that Musk expressed once more in his presentation and in relation to technology he highlighted some design changes that will make it possible to reduce costs. Also used as scenery – although it is impossible not to see it from a distance – Musk displayed the Starship spacecraft on its booster – called Super Heavy – on the orbital launch pad newly built by his company. The businessman’s idea, and he stressed it several times, is that these rockets be reusable, an almost essential quality to lower costs. According to some specialized sites that follow the space development of SpaceX, if this Musk project works, Starship would become the most powerful rocket that existed in the entire history of astronomy, with twice the power of Saturn V, the rocket of NASA with which the astronauts arrived on the Moon.
In principle, July 2021 was the scheduled date for the Starship’s orbital test flight, but… things happened. Nor did they occur in January and although Musk this time did not verbalize a date to carry out that postponed test, it is estimated that by the end of February the Federal Aviation Administration (of the United States) will deliver the “environmental assessment that studied what the impact of the launch of a rocket of these dimensions in a section of the rural coast of Texas. In that area, the local authorities received complaints regarding the possible consequences to the local ecosystem. Given this and if the aforementioned report implies modifications for SpaceX, Elon Musk anticipated the transfer of some operational issues of the company to Cape Kennedy, in Florida.