SpaceX Starship Breaks New Ground With V3 Booster Tests While NASA Considers Dumping Boeing SLS for Moon Missions

About this episode

The episode discusses SpaceX's recent milestones with the Starship program and NASA's potential shift from Boeing's SLS to SpaceX's Starship for lunar missions.

SpaceX has been making headlines with back-to-back milestones in the past few days, pushing the boundaries of space travel and its Starship program. On Monday, March 16, the company conducted the first-ever static fire test of its V3 Starship booster, a key pre-launch milestone for this larger, more powerful megarocket designed for moon and Mars missions, according to AIAA and SPACE reports. SpaceX followed up with a 10-engine static fire on March 18 at Starbase Pad 2, which ended early due to a groundside issue but confirmed successful startup on all Raptor 3 engines, with a full 33-engine test next, as detailed in SpaceX's X post shared by Ellie in Space. In operational triumphs, SpaceX launched 29 Starlink satellites on March 19 from Cape Canaveral's Space Launch Complex 40 aboard a Falcon 9, with the first stage—booster B1077 on its 27th flight—nailing a landing on the "Just Read the Instructions" droneship in the Atlantic, per VideoFromSpace and SciNews footage. The biggest buzz comes from NASA potentially overhauling its Artemis moon program, sidelining Boeing's troubled SLS rocket in favor of SpaceX's Starship for Artemis 3 and beyond. Bloomberg reports NASA is eyeing a…

People in this episode

Host: Elon Musk

Topics covered

• SpaceX
• NASA
• Boeing
• Starship
• moon missions
• Artemis program
• rocket testing

Keywords

• SpaceX
• Starship
• NASA
• Boeing
• SLS
• Artemis
• rocket testing
• satellite launch
• Raptor engines
• moon missions

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: SpaceX, NASA, Boeing, AIAA, SPACE

Products: Starship, SLS

Books & works: Ellie in Space, VideoFromSpace, SciNews

Places: Cape Canaveral, Atlantic

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