What started off as basically a sandbar in the middle of nowhere is now Starbase, Texas. We named it “The Gateway to Mars,” because this is where we’re going to develop the technology necessary to take humanity, civilization, and life as we know it to another planet for the first time in the 4.5-billion-year history of Earth.926
Q: Why Mars?927
There are not a lot of options, frankly. Venus is a superheated, high-pressure acid bath. Venus is hell, almost literally.928 The moon is closer but it doesn’t have an atmosphere, has only one-sixth of Earth’s gravity, and is missing many key resources.929 Plus, a Mars base is more likely to survive a conflict on Earth than a moon base.930
We could establish a crude permanent base on the moon. That would be the next step up from Apollo. Let’s not just go there for a few hours and head back; let’s have an occupied science base on the moon. We could build epic telescopes on the moon. They would enable us to see what’s going on out there. Maybe we would detect those aliens!931
When we’re out there exploring the galaxy, we might find a whole bunch of dead one-planet civilizations. They just never made it to the next planet. Can you imagine doing archaeology on strange ghost-town planets?!932
Progress is measured by the timeline to establish a self-sustaining civilization on Mars. That’s how we gauge our progress at Starbase.933
Occupy Mars, man.934
Q: How can we actually get enough stuff to Mars to build a city?
We’re now at the point where we can produce a Starship roughly every two or three weeks. Now, we don’t always produce a ship every two or three weeks because we are still making design upgrades. But ultimately we’re aiming for the ability to produce a thousand ships a year.935
Starbase will probably be making as many Starships for Mars as Boeing and Airbus make commercial airplanes each year. This is really an enormous scale of manufacturing, because each Starship is bigger than a 747 or an A380.
Tesla and other car companies are still building far higher volumes of complex manufactured tonnage than SpaceX. That is a way of saying it’s achievable. These numbers are insanely high by traditional space standards but they are achievable, because they have been achieved in other industries.936
Starship is the key to preserving the light of consciousness. That’s what it’s all about.
It may end up being the most important thing that we ever do.937
We’re hoping to increase the cadence of flights to Mars dramatically with every launch window. Roughly every two years we will dramatically increase the number of ships that go to Mars. Ultimately we will try to get to one thousand or two thousand ships per Mars rendezvous.938
We’ll need to do a lot of orbital refueling. Orbiting rocket tanker ships will replenish the propellant of the ships that will actually go to Mars. We’re aiming to demonstrate ship-to-ship propellant transfer. It’s hard to make this not look a bit naughty because it's two ships connecting and doing a fluid transfer.
We would create a propellant depot ship that would look like a huge hot dog. Shortly before going to Mars, Starships would take off with a couple hundred tons of payload from Earth. They would reach orbit with almost no propellant left, then get refilled by the tanker for the journey to Mars.939
We need roughly ten thousand missions to get to a million tons transferred to Mars. We think we can do this by 2044.940 My guess is that it will require about a million tons to build a self-sufficient city, but it might be ten million tons. I hope it’s not one hundred million tons. That’d be a lot.941
Starship in its final form will probably do well over two hundred tons to orbit each flight, with full reusability and the ability to fly multiple times a day. We plan to launch about five uncrewed Starships to Mars in 2026. If those all land safely, then crewed missions are possible in 2028. If we encounter challenges, the crewed missions will be postponed two more years.
It is only possible to travel from Earth to Mars every two years when the planets are aligned. If Mars is on the other side of the sun, you can’t get there. Can’t go through the sun.942 This increases the difficulty but also serves to immunize Mars from many catastrophic events on Earth.
SpaceX will increase the number of spaceships traveling to Mars exponentially with every opportunity. We want to enable anyone who wants to be a space traveler and go to Mars. That means you, your family, or friends—anyone who dreams of great adventure.943
We want to get to the point where we’re sending over a million tons at every Mars transfer window. Then we’re a serious civilization. A megaton per transfer window. We can’t fly there continuously, so we’d have a gathering of a thousand ships or more.944
Eventually, there will be thousands of Starships going to Mars. Imagine an armada of Starships waiting in orbit for the planets to align and then this gigantic Starfleet taking off for Mars.945 It will be a glorious sight to see! Can you imagine?946
This is an extremely difficult engineering problem. But no new physics is required.947
Q: What’s the math on the journey to Mars?
The fundamental optimization is minimizing cost per ton to orbit, and ultimately cost per ton to the surface of Mars. This may seem like a purely mercantile objective, but it is actually the thing that needs to be optimized. There is a certain cost per ton to the surface of Mars where we can afford to establish a self-sustaining city. If we don’t get the cost down, we can’t afford to do it.
It will cost maybe a quarter of a percent or half a percent of gross domestic product (GDP). That is palatable. A few people going to Mars will not cause some meaningful drop in the standard of living.948 For less than 1 percent of GDP, we can buy life insurance.949
Starlink internet is what’s being used to pay for humanity getting to Mars. I would like to thank everyone who has bought Starlink because you’re helping secure the future of civilization.
Thank you.950
Right now, you couldn’t fly to Mars for a trillion dollars. No amount of money could get any human a ticket to Mars. First, we need to make this possible. But we don’t just want to have flags and footprints on Mars for fifty years, like we did with the moon. To pass the great filter of existing only on one planet, we need to truly become a multiplanet species.951