Talking at the conference at the Satellite 2018, Gwynne Shotwell, the President and COO of SpaceX, unveiled that the firm aims to carry out the first orbital roll outs of BFR by the beginning of 2020, with suborbital tests for spaceship starting in the H1 of next year.

Just 6 Months post CEO Elon Musk first introduced the ITS (Interplanetary Transport System) in Australia, a flood of new comments from the 2 executives have made it overpoweringly obvious that SpaceX aims to have its initial shuttle ready for small suborbital test flights at the start of next year. Considering meaningless acknowledgment of Musk at SXSW 2018 for his tendency towards excessively hopeful timelines, the frequent affirmations of test flights for BFS starting next year (and now an orbital roll out of the complete BFR ship and booster by the beginning of 2020) hold a reasonable deal more firm than they did last year.

The last few weeks have been filled with a lot of analogous claims from SpaceX officials such as Musk, Shotwell, and others; all aimed partly on the next-generation launch vehicle of the company, BFR. Made of a single massive second stage spaceship and an equally massive booster, the rocket is meant to allow the reasonable expansion of enduring human outposts throughout the inner solar system and on Mars by completing the promise made decades ago of fully reusable launch ships.

To a limit, SpaceX has already developed the technologies and principles required to dependably reuse and recover the two-stage rockets’ booster stage, which was shown by their unbelievable accomplishment of Falcon 9.

BFR is a whole diverse thing, partially due to its huge thrust, massive size, and new tankage & propellant systems, but those issues are more technological than theoretical. SpaceX is already aware of how to use boosters again, and it will apply that to BFR.