NEW YORK: “SpaceX is no longer planning to upgrade Falcon 9 second stage for reusability,” Tesla’s Elon Musk said in a tweet Saturday.
Musk says he’s accelerating the Big Falcon Rocket instead and calls the new design “very exciting!’ and “delightfully counter-intuitive.”
Falcon 9 will only go through “minor tweaks to improve on reliability only, provided NASA & USAF are supportive,” Musk said when answering a question from a Twitter user.
In 2016, Musk introduced the term BFR as a rocket not only designed to take passengers and cargo to Mars, but also travel within Earth in less than an hour.
The company announced on Sept 17 that Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa will be the first private passenger to ride around the moon on the company’s BFR rocket in 2023.