Elon Musk wants to revolutionize space travel with his new rocket. And that rocket, Starship, is now the largest and most powerful spacecraft ever built.

Plus, it’s designed to be completely and quickly reusable. His private company, SpaceX, which is behind the creation, hopes to develop a spacecraft that can be used more like an airplane than a traditional rocket system, landing, refueling and launching again within hours of landing.

SpaceX has announced that it intends to launch Starship on October 13 from 07:00 local time (13:00 BST) after obtaining all necessary approvals.

This will be Starship’s fifth deployment and all eyes will be on the landing stages – particularly the return of the lower part of the vehicle, the Super Heavy booster.

So far we’ve only seen what you might call a simulated sea landing or “splashdown.” We hope this is the first time the booster has returned to the launch pad.

For a spacecraft to be reusable, it must be able to land safely.

The SpaceX founder has announced that he will attempt to capture the launch vehicle in mid-air upon its return to Earth using the launch tower’s giant mechanical arms or “rods” – or as Musk calls it, “Mechazilla.”

This is something that has never been done before, and ultimately SpaceX wants to capture the ship – the upper part of the vehicle – in the same way. But that won’t happen on the upcoming test flight.

None of the Starship missions have been crewed to date, and there are no plans to bring people on board for the next flight.

But Musk and his company have big plans for the rocket system to one day take humanity to Mars.

A trip to Mars is not yet in sight. But the gigantic rocket already boasts some impressive specs and puts all of its predecessors to shame.

Starship is a two-stage vehicle. The “ship” is the top part and sits on a booster called Super Heavy.

Thirty-three engines at the base of this booster produce around 74 meganewtons of thrust. To put that in perspective, it is almost 700 times as powerful as the thrust of a regular passenger aircraft, the Airbus A320neo.

If you’ve flown with Aer Lingus, British Airways or Lufthansa, imagine the thrill of taking off on one of these planes. Then multiply that by 700.

The vehicle has grown by about a meter since its second test flight in June this year, with Starship now measuring just over 120 meters in total.

This extra height comes from making the Super Heavy Booster itself 1m longer.

It is also about twice as powerful as the Saturn V rocket that first took humanity to the lunar surface.

SpaceX says the power should be capable of propelling a payload weighing at least 150 tons from the launch pad to low-Earth orbit.

Both the ship and the Super Heavy booster are powered by a mixture of ice-cold liquid methane and liquid oxygen known as Methalox.

To date, Starship has completed four test flights. On the first flight, the rocket system exploded early before the booster could separate.

It’s worth noting that such disruptions are part of SpaceX’s plan to accelerate development by launching systems that they know aren’t perfect and learning from the mistakes.

And with each test, real progress was made – first with a smooth separation and finally with a successful return in which both the ship and the booster performed a controlled descent and hovered over the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, respectively, until they splashed down .

Anyone watching nearby as the booster returns to Earth can expect a thunderous bang as it decelerates from supersonic speeds.

While SpaceX plans to capture the launch vehicle with the launch tower, this time we won’t get a similar return of the upper part – the ship. If we do that, it shouldn’t be too different from the descent of the Super Heavy.

But since there is no launch tower on either Mars or the Moon, the ship must be able to land on its legs.

To do this, it maneuvers horizontally as it begins to descend, which Musk calls a “belly flop” maneuver. This increases the vehicle’s air resistance, causing it to slow down.

Once the ship is close enough to the surface, it is slow enough to start its engines, bringing the vehicle into a vertical position.

The ship then uses its rockets to steer itself safely downwards and land on its landing legs on a hard surface.

The ship did all of this on its previous flight – apart from landing on a landing platform. So far it has only landed in the sea.

One of the purposes of test flights is to highlight problem areas, and the rapid turnaround time between each test flight means that weak points need to be redesigned at lightning speed.

If you do something wrong, the entire internal structure of the rocket could be melted by hot gases.

There are a few things Starship could soon be used for.

So far, Musk has used his own rockets, such as the Falcon 9 series, to launch his own commercial satellites, known as Starlink.

These satellites have a short lifespan of about five years, and the flock in orbit must be constantly replenished to maintain the same number of satellites in space.

NASA also wants to use Starship as part of its Artemis program, which aims to establish a long-term human presence on the moon.

Musk wants Starship to make long-distance flights to Mars and back in the more distant future – about a nine-month trip each way.

“It would be conceivable to have five or six people per cabin if you really wanted to accommodate people. But I think broadly we would expect to see two or three people per cabin, so nominally about 100 people per flight to Mars,” Musk said.

The idea is to send the ship part of the vehicle into low-Earth orbit and “park” it there. It could then be refueled in orbit by a SpaceX “tanker” — essentially another ship without windows — for its onward journey to Mars.

It is also conceivable that Starship could be used to launch space telescopes.

The Hubble Telescope is about the size of a bus and the James Webb Telescope is almost three times larger.

To quickly deploy thousands of satellites or a larger telescope, you need a large rocket.

Finally, the spacecraft was also built to carry heavy loads needed to build space stations and ultimately the infrastructure for a human presence on the Moon.

A missile that fires 700 times more powerful than a passenger plane is bound to have an impact on the environment.

A draft environmental report from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released in July shows that the new license SpaceX is applying for would allow 25 Starship launches per year.

According to the FAA, this would emit a total of 97,342 tons of CO2 equivalent – or 3,894 tons per launch.

In comparison, a typical car in the United States emits about 4.6 tons of CO2 per year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

If we crunch the numbers, that means one Starship launch emits as much greenhouse gas as 846 cars would emit over the course of a year.

In purely numerical terms, this is pretty insignificant compared to the commercial aviation industry.

But with Musk hoping to potentially increase the number of launches to hundreds per year in the future, those numbers could add up.