Tech Crunch by Darrell Etherington 6/16/2020
SpaceX to build floating spaceports for rockets bound for the Moon and Mars, and for hypersonic Earth travel
SpaceX is hiring experts in Offshore Operations in Brownsville, job ads revealed on Tuesday – and the purpose is to help the company develop and build floating spaceports that will provide launch sites for the company’s’ Super Heavy-class launch vehicles. SpaceX will use these larger rockets to get its forthcoming large payload rockets to the Moon, to Mars – and also for point-to-point travel right here on Earth, according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
Musk said on Twitter that this was the purpose behind the new job posting, which was originally spotted by Dan Paasch. SpaceX has previously shown concepts of its forthcoming Super Heavy rocket booster, paired with its Starship spacecraft, launching for hypersonic Earth travel – which would reduce the trip time for long-haul flights to merely a couple of hours. Those concepts have thus far consisted only of renders, however, and we didn’t know what the plan was in terms of how and from where those spacecraft would launch until today.
Starship and Super Heavy are primarily being developed to help SpaceX and Musk realize their goal of delivering human to Mars, in order to colonize that and other interstellar destinations including the Moon to “make humans an interstellar species.†But while those goals may seem out of reach to most people, the company’s aims of using the same fully reusable spacecraft to greatly decrease the cost of point-to-point supersonic travel here on Earth are likely to be much more relevant.
More:
https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/16/spacex-to-build-floating-spaceports-for-rockets-bound-for-the-moon-and-mars-and-for-hypersonic-earth-travel/
