SpaceX plans to build a floating spaceport

the American aerospace company SpaceX has posted jobs engineers required to help design and build a floating spaceport. CEO Elon Musk plans to begin test flights on the Ground in 2-3 years.

SpaceX hires experts in offshore operations in Brownsville (Texas). Near this city the company builds and tests a prototype of a new type of spaceship — Starship.

While SpaceX has not yet launched missiles with the floating platforms, but successfully planted more than four dozen boosters of the first stage. These components are the most costly in the production of missiles and through re-use, save millions of dollars.

According to the Elon musk, SpaceX will use the spaceport to send their new rockets to the moon, Mars, and also for hypersonic travel on Earth.

it is assumed that the final version of Starship will be able to accommodate 100 passengers. The ship will be fitted with six engines of the Raptor. It will be launched from the Ground with a heavy booster, which is 31 engine Raptor.

Musk was planning to use rockets for hypersonic travel on the Ground, which would reduce the time of flight over long distances to a couple of hours. However, until now these concepts have been presented only for rendering.

Musk not only wants to send a Starship to Mars, but also to keep the spacecraft enough to use it again. To do this, the rocket will have to sweat, almost literally. The nose of the rocket heated to 1480°C when entering the orbit of Mars. Steel starts to melt already at 1315°C, so the SpaceX engineers decided to cool down the outer layer ultrakorotkim fuel from the cryogenic methane and oxygen, which will seep through the pores of the outer shell of the rocket and thereby cooling it.

Musk wrote that the Starship belongs to the reusable spaceships. To come back to Earth it will not vertically. “It will descend at hypersonic speed at an angle of 60 degrees, then begins to fall and falls, as the skydiver, just in control of himself, and then is rotated (by a nozzle to the Ground – approx. ed.) and sits down,” he described it is the head of SpaceX.

Recently, Musk called upon the employees of SpaceX to speed up work on a Starship. Musk noted that employees need to consider the development of a Starship’s main priority.

In September last year, Elon Musk claimed that a space ship Starship needs to go into orbit six months later, and subsequently to fly to Mars. Just Musk is planning about 10 unmanned test flight into orbit and then people says that they will try to do it in 2020. Apparently, the plans were still some adjustments have been made as prototypes of a spaceship explode in tests.

last year, Musk unveiled a prototype spaceship built of stainless steel. The length of the ship is 50 meters, the dry weight (without fuel and cargo) — about 120 tons. Starship was supposed to land nozzles to solid surfaces. Elon Musk said that in the next ten years, SpaceX plans to build thousands of spaceships Starship.