While space transportation might feel like the cutting edge of technology, no rocket has yet surpassed NASA’s Saturn V – first launched in 1967. To this day it remains the tallest, heaviest, most powerful vehicle ever built. Its design and construction were overseen by Wernher von Braun, the engineer behind Nazi Germany’s V2 rocket – the first man-made object to reach space. In the fifty years since, we have yet to see a more impressive machine than one whose construction was led by a man born before a plane even crossed the Atlantic.
In order to send humans to Mars, Musk’s SpaceX will have to deliver precisely that. Enter the BFR – short for ‘big fucking rocket’ – the intended successor to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters. Using a new family of Raptor rocket engines, the BFR will finally unseat Saturn V as the most impressive launch vehicle ever constructed. At the same time NASA is working on its Space Launch System which, when completed, will join the BFR in a new super-Saturn V category of spacecraft.
Birth of a Private Space Industry
Musk forecasts the first delivery of cargo to Mars using the ITS as soon as 2022, two years before the first humans set foot on the Red Planet. While his predictions are often right, Musk is notoriously late in delivery. That is partly a function of his business interests – renewables, electric cars and rockets – being at the cutting edge of industrial innovation. In reality, however, it is more an outgrowth of the South African’s knack for raising interest through promising what seems undeliverable. While that is good for grabbing the media spotlight, it is bad for meeting deadlines.
But if you look at the story of SpaceX so far, you soon realise you’d be a fool to bet against him. Musk founded the company at the turn of the millennium, with NASA rudderless in the twilight years of the Space Shuttle programme and the romance of earlier decades drained from the industry. Then, the idea of commercial space transport was widely viewed as outlandish, and Musk a spendthrift eccentric.
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