The biggest rocket ever built may be ready to fly surprisingly soon.

The first full-size prototype of SpaceX's Starship vehicle should be ready to launch on an orbital test flight "in a few weeks," company founder and CEO Elon Musk said via Twitter on Saturday (Aug. 14).

That target seems very soon, given that SpaceX has yet to run the 395-foot-tall (120 meters) rocket through its usual battery of preflight tests. And there's a big logistical hurdle to overcome as well: The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is conducting an environmental assessment of SpaceX's South Texas orbital launch site, where Starship will lift off.

The FAA has not yet released its draft review, and the agency will accept public comments about the report for 30 days after it comes out. So Starship's orbital jaunt cannot feasibly happen just a few weeks from now — a reality that Musk acknowledged in his Saturday tweet, which ended with the words "pending regulatory approval."

In fact, Musk's tweet may have been designed to put a little pressure on the FAA to pick up the pace. After all, he has expressed frustration with FAA regulations in the past, stressing that such rules need to be streamlined if humanity is ever going to achieve game-changing launch frequencies.

And SpaceX intends Starship to be a game changer. The vehicle, which consists of a huge first-stage booster known as Super Heavy and a spacecraft called Starship, is designed to take people and cargo to the moon, Mars and other distant destinations.