It’s been an eventful month for Elon Musk. The world’s richest man and founder of Tesla and SpaceX was, controversially, named Time’s person of the year; became embroiled in a Twitter spat over his taxes with a politician he branded “Senator Karen” and got a bizarre new haircut after splitting with his girlfriend, the pop singer Grimes.

 

Moonwatch: Nasa resumes work on lunar lander

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Next month, however, or perhaps a few weeks beyond if the attendant gremlins of spaceflight choose to play with the launch schedule, could come an achievement to surpass anything Musk has done before.

The first orbital test launch of the largest and most powerful rocket ship ever to leave Earth – SpaceX’s towering Starship, from its Starbase headquarters in Texas – is seen by many as a pathway back to the moon for the first time in half a century and maybe the first vehicle to eventually land humans on Mars.

The project that began life in Musk’s overactive mind more than a decade ago is every bit as ambitious as his pronouncement this week that: “I’ll be surprised if we’re not landing on Mars within five years.”

Starship will be the first spacecraft in which all components are fully reusable, reducing significantly the traditionally astronomic costs of space travel. It has an unprecedented in-flight refueling capacity, allowing for more frequent and efficient operations.

As the visionary behind the return to human spaceflight from US soil last year for the first time since the retirement of Nasa’s shuttle fleet in 2011, Musk, 50, is confident that his 395ft (120m) spacecraft, a full 32ft taller than the Apollo-era Saturn V, can deliver.

Time magazine, in honoring the billionaire entrepreneur, appeared to acknowledge that humankind’s greatest achievements come from unorthodox minds. Musk, it said, is “a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, PT Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars.”

“One of the things that [he] has artfully figured out how to do is, whenever there has been any doubt about his ability to accomplish something, in some period of time thereafter, he has focused his attention, expertise and talent to go out and demonstrate that you can do it,” O’Keefe, professor of strategic management and leadership at Syracuse University, told the Guardian.

“And that’s what this is. It is going to be interesting to see where this goes. [Starship] provides options, very significant options.

“To look at, for example, the lunar surface as being not only reachable by multiple means but also by commercial sources that can do the regular resupply and so forth, will be extremely beneficial.”

Starship will be propelled into orbit by a first-stage booster rocket called Super Heavy, to which SpaceX attached 29 of its Raptor engines before sending the entire craft to the launchpad at its Starbase launchpad this week. With about 16m pounds of thrust, and a capacity to lift up to 165 tons from the Earth’s surface, Starship is almost twice as powerful as the Saturn V rockets that sent 12 astronauts to the moon between 1969 and 1972.