Another day, another story courtesy of Elon Musk’s Twitter account.
This time old mate has logged in to tell us that he’s renaming SpaceX’s ‘Big Fucking Rocket’ (BFR) to the more brand-friendly ‘Starship’.
Not to be fair, BFR was actually dubbed Big Falcon Rocket in an official capacity – but that’s not was it was referred to internally or even by the media at times. We all know what it was really called.
It’s also not the first time that Musk has played around with juvenile names. His original plan for the Tesla naming conventions was to have each model spell out ‘S3XY’.
Now the rocket will be known as the more conservative ‘Starship’ and the boosters will go by ‘Super Heavy’.
Technically, two parts: Starship is the spaceship/upper stage & Super Heavy is the rocket booster needed to escape Earth’s deep gravity well (not needed for other planets or moons)
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2018
The BFR plans were officially announced back in September and the rocket itself is being developed the Los Angeles for a casual $6.9 billion.
The craft will allgedly be around 118m tall, have 5,400 tons of thrust and be capable of taking 100 tons of cargo as well as 100 passengers to Mars.
Amusingly, Musk was called out on the inaccuracy of the new rocket name on Twitter, which he of course had an answer for.
Unless this “starship” is sent on a mission to another star system it can’t be called a starship
— Michael Wolman (@mwolman98) November 20, 2018
I guess we’ll see.