Why SpaceX Producing Starship Massively

In February 2021, 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. 

When the Starship spacecraft is stacked on top of the Super-heavy booster, it will Tower over NASA's monster Saturn 5 that sent astronauts to the moon with roughly twice its thrust and weight. anyone standing beside Starship would look pretty small.

Height Comparison of Starship image: artists impression

Musk said space 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 five years constructing just one core stage of NASA's latest launch vehicle in development the SLS.

So why does SpaceX needs 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 a hundred year, allowing SpaceX to reach its goal in a decade. 

The 1,000 strong feet, each capable of carrying a hundred people could transport a 100,000 Settlers 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 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 your 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 Starship which is why SpaceX is creating a satellite internet service for Earth called Starlink.

Starlink Global Internet Service

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 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. 

On the other hand, Starship is intended to be turned around as fast as today's passenger planes with minimal maintenance in refueling before it takes off  again.

Starship is the fundamental Holy Grail break through needed for access to space, to make humanity true space civilization we must have a fully and rapidly reusable rocket. - Elon Musk

That includes a fully and rapidly reusable booster that Kickstart ship into orbit, separates, and returns to earth within minutes. the boosters 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 a launch Tower arm a bold and still untested strategy before putting it back into Service as much as a dozen times a day. 

Starship Catching Tower image Credit: the smallstars team

We have yet to see the booster an action. Only prototypes of the spacecraft have flown on their own. but that could soon change. SpaceX has asked to Regulators to approve it's first orbital flight test of the Starship and super-heavy together. and the combination could also take off from an ocean Spaceport in 2022.

The 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 un-crewed flight to the Red Planet in 2024 with humans potentially travel in 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 had 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. But 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 the launch to $2,000,000, aspirationally compared to the estimated  $2 billion Per-launch the non reusable SLS. 

Reducing the cost of space flight is necessary If life were to ever be multiplanetary. 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 

If we want to have a future that is inspiring exciting, a future where we are a space-faring civilization out there among the Stars, I think that's every kid gets excited about that, You don't even need to teach them - Elon Musk 

Shooting for the Stars begins with a plan to rapidly churn out Starships here in South Texas, which has obviously 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.

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