These six engines will power the Starship 50 meters high, delivering it over long distances, for example, to the Moon or Mars. The transport ship will be powerful enough to lift off the surface of these two celestial bodies, but it will need help to escape from the Earth’s gravity well. Therefore Starship will leave our planet on a giant rocket called Super Heavy, which will be propelled by about 30 conventional versions of Raptor engines.

SpaceX said both Super Heavy and Starship can be fully and quickly reused. Musk suggests that the combination of a spacecraft and a super-heavy launch vehicle will reduce the cost of space travel so much that it will make ambitious plans like the colonization of Mars economically feasible.

SpaceX is working on the final version of Starship, rolling around a series of prototypes. Recently, single-engine SN5 and SN6 have passed test “jumps” to an altitude of about 150 meters, and a three-engine SN8 is preparing for its own flight to an altitude of 20 kilometers in the near future.