Elon Musk renames SpaceX Big Falcon Rocket to Starship

Elon
Musk in front of a SpaceX mock-up of the
Starship.
SpaceX; NASA; Mark
Brake/Getty Images; Samantha Lee/Business
Insider

SpaceX has long been touting a rocket in the works that wants to
be the first to put people on Mars, and all that hype now comes
with a new name.

Elon Musk, the company’s CEO, took to
Twitter late Monday night to reveal the new name of the

387-foot SpaceX rocket. Up until now, the rocket has been

operating under the name Big Falcon Rocket — dubbed BFR, and
also referred to by many (including Musk) as the “Big F—–g
Rocket.”

But now, the rocket is named Starship.

The spacecraft technically consists of two parts: the spaceship
that holds people and cargo, called Starship, and the booster
that launches the rocket to Mars, called Super Heavy.

SpaceX’s BFR project
has made headlines for what Musk sees as the rocket’s end
goal: to eventually bring humans to Mars. Last month, Musk said
in an interview that SpaceX is
eyeing 2024 for the launch.

Read more:

Elon Musk says SpaceX is on track to launch people to Mars within
6 years — here’s the full timeline of his plans to colonize the
red planet

Final designs for the rocket,
released in September, present a fully reusable booster and
fully reusable spaceship,
designed to hold 100 people or 150 tons of cargo. Musk
estimates the rocket will cost between $2 billion and $10 billion
to create.

The
planned dimensions of SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft and Super
Heavy booster.
Olivia Reaney/Business
Insider

To help understand the magnitude of what Musk and his thousands
of employees at SpaceX are trying to accomplish, Business Insider
created an interactive size-comparison graphic.

Next to the rendering of the rocket shown below, you’ll see a
series of familiar objects at the rocket’s base. (Some are so
small that you may have to scroll down a bit.) Toggle through the
20 comparisons by clicking “next” or “back” to get a sense of the
rocket’s scale: