By Vincent Ng

In the Starbase R&D facility in Boca Chica, Texas the biggest spaceship is being constructed. The rocket is being constructed by the company SpaceX. It stands around 120m(400ft) high and it makes previous rockets look tiny.

The site has been around since 2011. Over the years this rocket and many others were being developed and many tests were run. It started as a private site but in 2014, the site was publicly announced to be the site where SpaceX would launch their rockets.

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX said in 2014 when he took over the site that he would expect to be launching commercial astronauts and private astronauts from the site in Texas. So far they have sent 10 rockets to space and all of them have landed safely.

There are two sections of the Starship that have recently been put together. The upper segment is called the starship which is where the astronauts stay. The bottom segment is a booster called super heavy. A massive crane was used to join the two segments together.

So far the Starship is almost complete but there are still weeks of tests that they have to conduct. One main issue is that SpaceX wants both sections of the rocket to land in designated places so they can reuse the parts.

The Super Heavy booster has around 16 million pounds of force which is also equal to 70 meganewtons. Compared to the main engines on the famous Apollo Saturn V, it is about double the power. The strongest booster that is still active now is also built by SpaceX and it produces 23 meganewtons of thrust at launch.

There are many hopes for the Starship. Many people including Elon Musk are hoping to use the technology to allow humans to travel to mars and maybe ferry people quickly around the world.

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