U.S. Military & SpaceX Are Researching How To Use Starship To Transport Cargo Around Earth

Featured Image Source: Digital render by @ErcXspace via Twitter

SpaceX is developing Starship to return astronauts to the Moon and launch hundreds of adventurous astronauts to colonize Mars. Not only will Starship enable human spaceflight but it will also be capable of launching cargo to point-to-point destinations around Earth in under an hour. Last year, the United States Military Command signed an agreement with SpaceX to research how they could use rockets to transport cargo on Earth. U.S. Transportation Commander Army General Stephen Lyons talked about the deal on October 7, 2020.

The deal is a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) to study how launch vehicles can be used to enable rapid transportation. “Think about moving the equivalent of a C-17 payload anywhere on the globe in less than an hour,” Lyons said. The military signed a CRADA agreement with two companies: SpaceX and Exploration Architecture Corporation (XArc). Under the 2020 agreement, SpaceX and XArc did some research into how their technology and launch vehicles can be used for city-to-city cargo transportation.

The U.S. Air Force (AF) now plans to fund the research. It’s 2022 budget proposal requests an investment of up to $48 million into helping to develop rocket technology capable of transporting cargo to destinations on Earth under a program called ‘Rocket Cargo’ – according to a report by CNBC’s Michael Sheetz, who first-reported the story (read more details in his article linked in the Tweet below). The program may involve working alongside multiple aerospace companies, not exclusively with SpaceX and XArc.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) published the ‘Rocket Cargo' program details in a PDF document that states: “The Department of the Air Force seeks to leverage the current multi-billion dollar commercial investment to develop the largest rockets ever, and with full reusability to develop and test the capability to leverage a commercial rocket to deliver AF cargo anywhere on the Earth in less than one hour, with a 100-ton capacity,” the document says. “The Air Force is not investing in the commercial rocket development, but rather investing in the Science & Technology needed to interface the capability with DoD logistics.” The document does not specify which aerospace companies will be selected, only that they seek to experiment with developing a rocket capable of “rapid loading and unloading” and even air-dropping “cargo from the rocket after re-entry in order to service locations where a rocket or aircraft cannot possibly land.”

The Pentagon wants use fully reusable, super heavy private rockets — a category led by SpaceX's Starship — to deliver or "air drop" cargo quickly anywhere in the world.

Here's what you should know about the Rocket Cargo program: https://t.co/cZijceqn58

— Michael Sheetz (@thesheetztweetz) June 4, 2021

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— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 4, 2021

Featured Image Source: Digital render by @ErcXspace via Twitter