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Prototypes of the upper stage of the SpaceX Starship have been flown nine times.[lower-alpha 1] Designed and operated by private manufacturer SpaceX, the flown prototypes of Starship have been Starhopper, SN5, SN6, SN8, SN9, SN10, SN11, and SN15. Starship is planned to be a fully-reusable two-stage super heavy-lift launch vehicle and unusual for previous launch vehicle and spacecraft designs, the upper stage of Starship is intended to function both as a second stage to reach orbital velocity on launches from Earth, and also eventually be used in outer space as an on-orbit long-duration spacecraft. It is being designed to take people to Mars and beyond into the Solar System.
In 2018, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also contracted to send a selection of space tourists (including Yusaku Maezawa) in a lunar flyby in 2023, as part of the dearMoon project. In 2019, SpaceX planned to launch commercial payloads using Starship no earlier than 2021.[1] In the same year, Space.com said that SpaceX may fly Starship to the Moon in 2022.
In July 2020, SpaceX anticipated a cargo Starship mission to Mars as early as 2022, followed by a crewed Starship mission to Mars in 2024.[2] As of 16 October 2020, the cargo flight will happen in 2024/5 and the crewed flight in 2026/7.[3]
(As of November 2021), Starships SN20 - SN24,[4] Super Heavy Boosters BN4 - BN9[5] and Test Tank BN2.1[4][5] are currently in production or testing. All flights have been launched at the Boca Chica launch site in Texas,[6] which SpaceX began to refer to as Starbase after March 2021.[7][8]
Eight prototype Starship second stage vehicles, each with different vehicle configurations, have flown nine suborbital test flights in the period July 2019 to May 2021.
SpaceX testing is proprietary, and the company does not release a detailed set of test objectives for their vehicle development test flights. All test flights have been launched from the SpaceX South Texas launch site at Boca Chica, South Texas.[9]
By August 2021, the iterative development work at the South Texas facility had become focused on the first orbital test flight of the two-stage Starship system.[10]
Test flights of the Starship system—the two-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle—when launched to an orbital trajectory will always consist of both a "ship", Starship, which also serves as the second stage, and also a booster, Super Heavy. On early flights the ship will be merely a second stage test article, as no cargo is planned for the early flights of the iterative test campaign.[10]
SpaceX has on various occasions made a few public statements about preliminary ideas for future operational orbital flights using the Starship system. All dates for future flights are speculative, and therefore approximate and "no earlier than" (NET) dates. Moreover, it is difficult to compare the dates in the tables since they have come from different sources and at different times over the past three years.
Elon Musk has stated that Starship would fly hundreds of times before launching with humans.[60] A likely use of some of these flights would be to launch Starlink satellites.[61]
The HLS variant of Starship was selected by NASA in April 2021 to be the lander for the Artemis missions to the Moon. Artemis 3 is intended to be the first human mission to the Moon to use Starship for long-duration crewed lunar landings as part of the Artemis program.
According to space journalist Mike Wall in 2020, Musk is said to envision that eventually more than 1,000 Starships could be needed to depart for Mars every 26 months, which could lead to the development of a sustainable Martian city in 50–100 years.[69]