When it comes to Mars exploration, Elon Musk is heavily banking on Starship, the newest and largest rocket made by SpaceX.
The thing is, Musk believes Starship is perhaps not big enough yet.
The plan is to make it larger, potentially by a significant margin, than it is now.
Musk recently said Starship will eventually be as tall as 500 feet – or 150 meters – and that would make it roughly 20 percent bigger than it is currently.
For reference, Starship currently stands 121 meters tall, which means it is not exactly small.
Moreoever – and this has always been one of SpaceX’s major selling points – the new Starship will be designed to be reusable, just like its predecessor.
With the new rocket, each launch will cost roughly $3 million.
Now, that is a lot of money in absolute terms, but it is a lot less than the cost per flight of the original Falcon 1, which was $9.5 million (adjusted for inflation), according to NBC.
Musk is involved in a lot of different things at the same time, from Tesla to the Boring Company’s Vegas Loop and AI, but it’s clear that these days, SpaceX is taking up most of his time, and most of his attention.
SpaceX teamed up with NASA for the Artemis mission, the one that’s going to (presumably? hopefully?) takes us back to the Moon again to set up a base over there.
Musk also once again reinstated he’s determined to make us a ‘multi-planetary’ species and said he’s working on a ‘game plan’ to take us to Mars.
Then again, he’s been saying that for the best part of 10 years at this point.
Still, he’s got enough money to make it happen, so we’ll just have to wait and see how it all goes.
