In February 2020, Elon Musk reportedly rallied his workers at the south Texas factory where
SpaceX is building Starship at one o’clock in the morning
The SpaceX CEO wanted to know why the factory wasn’t running at all hours of the night.
Musk has always wanted to move fast.
It is evident in how quickly he wants to build Starships - designed to be a fully reusable
launch vehicle that will be the largest object to ever fly.
This is, I think, the most inspiring thing that I’ve ever seen.
When the Starship spacecraft is stacked on top of the Super Heavy booster, it will tower
over NASA’s monster Saturn V that sent astronauts to the moon - with roughly twice its thrust
and weight.
Anyone standing beside Starship would look pretty small as I found out.
You can hardly see me right now unless we zoom in really close.
Musk has said SpaceX intends to build one Starship a week.
And eventually, one every three days.
To put that into perspective, it can take years to build a single rocket.
Boeing spent about 5 years constructing just one core stage
of NASA's latest launch vehicle in development, the SLS.
So, why does SpaceX need so many Starships?
Musk believes his vision of colonizing Mars requires a fleet of a thousand ships.
Building one every three days would produce about 100 a year, allowing SpaceX to reach its goal
in a decade.
The 1,000-strong fleet, each capable of carrying 100 people, could transport 100,000
settlers or 100 megatons of cargo to Mars in the first year.
SpaceX wouldn’t make trips to Mars every year, however.
It would only launch the fleet when the orbits of Earth and Mars are closest to each other
in order to shorten the trip which happens roughly every two years.
Still, it’s a 34 million mile (55 million km) trek that takes about six months one way.
The goal of SpaceX is to send a million people to Mars by 2050.
Musk is confident that moving there will be similar to the cost of selling a home in the
United States.
He pegs a round trip ticket at half a million dollars one day and even less in the future.
Relying on ticket sales alone won’t pay for that many Starships which is why SpaceX
is creating a satellite internet service for Earth called Starlink.
Musk has predicted the broadband internet system could bring in as much as $50 billion
dollars a year.
The Falcon 9 has been responsible for launching the satellites.
It’s no Starship because it’s not fully reusable but it is a step in that direction
since it can be partially reused.
The booster lands, gets turned around in a few months, and takes off again, though that’s
still not good enough for Musk.
I wouldn’t call it rapid by aircraft standards.
On the other hand, Starship is intended to be turned around as fast as today’s passenger
planes with minimal maintenance and refueling before it takes off again.
This is the fundamental holy grail breakthrough needed for access to space, to make humanity
a true space-faring civilization.
We must have a fully and rapidly reusable rocket.
That includes a fully and rapidly reusable booster that kicks Starship into orbit, separates,
and returns to Earth within minutes.
The booster is only required to escape Earth’s deep gravity well so it’s not needed on Mars.
One idea is to catch the Super Heavy with
the launch tower arm - a bold and still untested
strategy before putting it back into
service as much as a dozen times a day.
We have yet to see the booster in action.
Only prototypes of the spacecraft have flown on their own.
But that could soon change.
SpaceX has asked regulators to approve its first orbital flight test of the Starship
and Super Heavy together.
And the combination could also take off from an ocean spaceport in 2022.
SpaceX purchased a couple of oil rigs, intending to transform them into floating Starship platforms.
They’re named Deimos and Phobos after the two Martian moons, given the ambitions of
the company.
The aim is to send an uncrewed flight to the red planet in 2024 with humans potentially
traveling there for the first time in 2026.
SpaceX is also working to turn Starship into a lunar lander
to send astronauts back to the moon.
Before any of these achievements, Musk is bracing for production hell.
He survived it with Tesla in 2017 and 2018 - toiling over how to build cars faster, spending
nights sleeping at his factory, before ultimately overcoming the manufacturing nightmare to
deliver nearly half a million vehicles in 2020.
What the entrepreneur is doing with cars he wants to do with rockets.
Musk claims an assembly line of reusable Starships would drive down the cost of a launch to
$2 million dollars, aspirationally.
Compared to the estimated $2 billion per launch of the non-reusable SLS.
Reducing the cost of space flight is necessary if life were to ever be multi-planetary.
For Musk, a city on Mars is not only an insurance policy against a potential catastrophe on Earth.
For him, it’s much more than that.
Do we want to have a future that is inspiring and exciting?
A future where we are a space-faring civilization, and out there among the stars, I think that's,
every kid gets excited about that, you don’t even need to teach them.
Shooting for the stars begins with a plan to rapidly churn out Starships here in south
Texas which has been aptly named: Starbase.
Starship is designed to fly two or three times a day and could also transport people from point
to point on Earth.
SpaceX says a trip from Sydney to London would be just 51 minutes.
If that becomes a reality, it would drastically reshape our concept of saving time.
There’s another way to save time in your everyday life.
Imagine if you could mail letters or ship packages without the hassle of going to the
post office while also getting discounted rates.
That could be a game changer - especially if you’ve got a business or a side hustle Etsy
shop sending out orders.
With my sponsor Stamps.com, you can print out postage online from home for any letter,
package, class of mail, anywhere you want to send it.
Once your mail is ready, simply drop it off or schedule a pick-up.
Stamps.com offers discounts of up to 40% off Post Office rates and up to 66% off UPS shipping rates.
So, stop wasting time going to the post office
and go to Stamps.com instead.
Use my promo code NEWSTHINK to get a special
offer that includes a 4-week trial plus
free postage and a digital scale.
There are no long-term commitments or contracts.
Once you head to Stamps.com - click on the top right of the homepage by the microphone
and enter my code NEWSTHINK.
The details are in my description.
For Newsthink, I’m Cindy Pom.