Elon Musk reacts to artist’s remarkable design of what Starship could look like in 2050
- Elon Musk has responded to an artist’s impression of how Starship could look in 2050
- The rendering shows Starship several times larger than it is now
- Musk has previously shared plans to increase the size of Starship
Published on Jul 24, 2024 at 7:52 AM (UTC+4)
by Claire Reid
Last updated on Jul 24, 2024 at 7:01 PM (UTC+4)
Edited by
Tom Wood
Elon Musk has responded to a clip showing what SpaceX’s Starship could look like by 2050.
Starship is SpaceX’s fully reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle that is designed to carry both people and cargo into Earth orbit and beyond.
It is the most powerful launch vehicle ever made and is able to carry up to 150 metric tonnes, fully reusable and 250 metric tonnes expendable.
It’s also the most expensive launch vehicle ever made – costing ‘at least $5 billion’, according to reports.
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‘Might be one day’
In a post on the Musk-owned social media platform X, Rui Huang – who posts under the handle @RuiHuang_art – shared an artist’s impression of how Starship might look in 2050.
And if you suffer from megalophobia you might want to give this a miss – because the futuristic design is absolutely massive.
In the short clip, it can be seen several times wider and a lot taller than the real Starship, stretching up into the sky, while a flying car appears to be floating along nearby.
The post caught Musk’s attention and it seems he thinks it’s not beyond the realms of possibility.
“Might be one day,” he wrote as he shared the clip on his own account.
When it comes to ambition, Musk is pretty much unmatched.
Alongside his work at Tesla on everything from the Cybertruck to his growing fleet of humanoid robots, he has big plans for SpaceX.
As you may know, Musk is very keen to colonize Mars and said in 2020 that he’d hoped to send a million people up to the Red Planet by 2050.
Elon Musk has recently revealed plans to increase the size of Starship
And as part of those plans, earlier this year, he revealed he wanted to increase the size of Starship.
Musk said Starship will eventually be as tall as 500 feet – or 150 meters – which would make it roughly 20 percent bigger than it is currently.
For reference, Starship currently stands 121 meters tall, so it’s not exactly small.
Starship hit a significant milestone last month after it made a groundbreaking soft water landing.
Starship successfully lifted off from the Starbase in Texas at 7.50am local time on June 6 – where it went on to ‘deliver maximum excitement’, according to SpaceX.
It managed to descend all the way down to the sea more or less intact – before losing a couple of pieces and eventually making its ‘soft landing’ in the ocean.
Claire Reid is a journalist who hails from the UK but is now living in New Zealand. She began her career after graduating with a degree in Journalism from Liverpool John Moore’s University and has more than a decade of experience, writing for both local newspapers and national news sites. Across her career she's covered a wide variety of topics, including celebrity, cryptocurrency, politics, true crime and just about everything in between.
