SpaceX/YouTube
Elon Musk on Saturday presented
SpaceX's newest plan to develop a super-heavy launch system called Starship.
Starship is a roughly 40-story rocket, designed to send up to 100 people to the surface of Mars. Musk delivered his talk in front of a smaller prototype called
Starship Mark 1.
Musk envisions each Starship as a low-cost,
reusable rocket. In an ideal world, a single Starship could launch several times per day and deliver hundreds of times more payload per year than all other rockets on Earth combined.
Musk said "we could potentially see people fly next year" in the vehicle.
Musk said such a dwarfing of current rocket capacity has "gotta be done" if humanity is to build a city on
Mars and "extend consciousness beyond Earth."
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Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, addressed planet Earth on Saturday night about his latest plans to "extend consciousness beyond Earth" using a towering steel spaceship.
Standing between two rockets that represented both the future of SpaceX and its nail-biting past, Musk delivered
his talk to more than 100 people from the company's fast-developing launch site in
Boca Chica, southeast Texas.
Behind Musk was a shorter rocket called Falcon 1, which — after three catastrophic failures in 2006, 2007, and 2008 — finally delivered a small payload into space for the first time. The mission also prevented Musk and SpaceX from going broke.
