SpaceX Must Build 1,000 Starships In 10 Years To Reach Mars Goal. So Far, 0 Starships Have Made It To Space
Elon Musk is all about leaving Earth behind and heading to Mars on one of his rockets and taking a whole bunch of people with him. He’s previously said that to make regular flights back and forth between Earth and Mars a reality, his company SpaceX would need to build about 1,000 Starships.
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That’s going to take a while, considering there’s only a few Starships in various stages of construction right now and it hasn’t – you know – been to space, let alone Mars. In a recent Twitter (or X, I do not care) post, Musk suggested SpaceX may actually need to build Starships even faster than he initially anticipated to make his weird Mars colony a reality.
“To achieve Mars colonization in roughly three decades, we need ship production to be 100/year, but ideally rising to 300/year,” Musk wrote on Twitter. That is a shit ton of ships. To put that in perspective, over the past three decades, Boeing has built an average of about 300 of its 737 aircraft per year. Keep in mind, 737s are a lot easier to build than rocket ships meant to go to Mars, and Boeing is really good at building them – something SpaceX cannot say at this point about Starship.
The 737’s pace of production isn’t the only airline-related goal SpaceX is after. Gwynne Shotwell, Musk’s second in command at the company, said last year that engineers have “…designed Starship to be as much like aircraft operations as we possibly can get it … We want to talk about dozens of launches a day, if not hundreds of launches a day,” Ars Technica reports. This needs to happen for SpaceX so it can lift millions of tons of equipment into space for a theoretical Mars settlement. Many of the launches will reportedly be Starship refueling tankers needed to make the interplanetary trip a reality. Think of them like space gas stations in a way.
Here’s how Musk and SpaceX plan to make the Starship and Super Heavy booster work over and over again and what exactly they’ll be used for, according to Ars Technica:
SpaceX still aims to make the Starship and its Super Heavy booster rapidly reusable. The crux is that the ship, the part that would travel into orbit, and eventually to the Moon or Mars, won’t be reused as often as the booster. These ships will come in a number of different configurations, including crew and cargo transports, refueling ships, fuel depots, and satellite deployers.
The booster design will be the same across the different types of ships in the fleet. The Super Heavy, with more than 30 Raptor engines, will also return to SpaceX’s launch sites about six minutes after liftoff, similar to the way SpaceX recovers its Falcon boosters today. Theoretically, Musk wrote, the booster could be ready for another flight in an hour.
With the Starship itself, the laws of physics and the realities of geography come into play. SpaceX will initially have Super Heavy and Starship launch and landing pads in South Texas and Cape Canaveral, Florida, although the company has flirted with the idea of offshore launch and landing platforms.
As an object flies in low-Earth orbit, the Earth rotates underneath it. This means that a satellite, or Starship, will find itself offset some 22.5 degrees in longitude from its launch site after a single 90-minute orbit around the planet. It could take several hours, or up to a day, for a Starship in low-Earth orbit to line up with one of the recovery sites.
“The ship needs to complete at least one orbit, but often several to have the ground track line abc up with the launch site, so reuse may only be daily,” Musk wrote, according to Ars Technica. “This means that ship production needs to be roughly an order of magnitude higher than booster production.”
Despite Musk’s general shittiness and desire to overpromise and underdeliver, Ars Technica says he’s actually been fairly level-headed when it comes to SpaceX. Hell, he’s even apparently said his schedule predictions are often aspirations. Yeah bud, you think?
Only time will tell if Musk’s goals for SpaceX can happen. His past successes and failures have had about as wide a range as the companies he’s owned. Will Mars travel end up like the Tesla Supercharger network – which is pretty much the gold standard of charging right now? Or will it end up like his underground Las Vegas tunnels – which are really just a joke at this point?
