SpaceX’s Starhopper spacecraft finally completed its long-delayed test launch. The same day, CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to speculate about what a future iteration of the spacecraft might look like.
The current Starhopper, a test version of the spacecraft Musk hopes will bring SpaceX to the surface of Mars, has a core diameter of nine meters. On Twitter, Musk said that a future iteration may be 18 meters wide, meaning it could be twice the size of the already-enormous Starship.
Assuming it’s kept at the same scale and its height is doubled as well, that would mean the future Starship model would tower over the launch pad at a height of 240 meters — substantially taller than the Washington Monument.
Teslarati concludes that the Starhopper 2.0 would weigh nearly 90 million pounds once it’s all fueled up.
Musk tweeting that a future spacecraft would “probably” have certain dimensions isn’t the same as concrete plans for his private space company. But if an 18 meter-wide Starhopper is in the works, according to Teslarati, SpaceX would need to use over 100 Raptor engines just to get the behemoth off the ground.
