The clip has garnered 1.5 million views, so far.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk on Tuesday shared a “destacking” video of the Starship rocket. The Starship rocket system is one of the ambitious projects of SpaceX. It is being readied to take humans back to the moon and for the first time to Mars and beyond.
The time-lapse video shared by Mr Musk on Twitter shows the Starship prototype SN20 (Serial No. 20) being removed from the top end of the rocket and brought to the ground. The exciting thing about the stacking or destacking process is the use of chopsticks arms.
When the stacking process was done for the first time in August 2021, it was executed using massive cranes. Since then, Mr Musk had dreamt of using chopsticks arms to stack or destack Starship. That dream has now become a reality. The chopsticks make destacking appear super easy.
Along with the video, Mr Musk wrote, “Destacking Starship”. The clip has garnered 1.5 million views, so far.
Destacking Starship pic.twitter.com/dUWz3uwwmb
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 14, 2022
When fully stacked, the spacecraft stands 120 metres tall, with a matte black upper-stage (Starship) placed on a shimmering silver Super Heavy first-stage rocket booster. Both these individual elements are fully reusable. Together, they make the world’s most powerful rocket capable of lifting up to 100 metric tonnes to Earth orbit.
The rocket system was stacked only days ago, just in time for Mr Musk’s Starship presentation on February 10. Mr Musk said, during the media interaction, that he feels “highly confident” that Starship will get to orbit this year. He, however, did not give an exact launch date.
Mr Musk had originally disclosed his plans to build a rocket system that could take humans to the corners of space they have never been to. Those plans took the shape of Starship in 2016. Since then, his company has made several attempts to realise the plans. In its effort, SpaceX suffered multiple setbacks, including when its rockets exploded during trials.
Recently, nearly 40 satellites of Mr Musk’s Starlink project were damaged by a geomagnetic storm.