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Prototypes of the upper stage of the SpaceX Starship have been flown nine times. 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 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 be used in outer space as an on-orbit long-duration spacecraft.
In 2018, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also planned 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.[2]
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.[3]
(As of April 2021), the Starships SN16–SN20[4] and Super Heavy Boosters BN2 and BN3[5] are currently in production.[5] 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 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]
Based on diverse sources over the past several years, 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" 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.
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.
Elon Musk has stated that Starship would fly hundreds of times before launching with humans.[70] A likely use of some of these flights would be to launch Starlink satellites.[71]
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.[72]