“More importantly, it is designed to be fully reusable, burning 80% liquid oxygen and 20% liquid methane (very low-cost propellant). This enables cost per ton to orbital space to be 10,000% lower than Saturn V,” the SpaceX CEO said.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, said “building a new world on Mars is now possible” after Starship, the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, surpassed the capability of NASA’s Saturn V Moon rocket.
“Starship is now more than twice as powerful as the Saturn V Moon rocket and, in a year or so, it will be three times as powerful at 10,000 metric tons of thrust,” Musk said in a post on X (formally twitter).
The Saturn V is a retired American super heavy-lift launch vehicle developed by NASA under the Apollo programme for human exploration of the Moon. The rocket was human-rated, had three stages, and was powered by liquid fuel.
The 400-foot-tall (122 meters) Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. The stainless-steel vehicle consists of two fully reusable elements: a huge booster called Super Heavy and a 165-foot-tall (50 m) upper stage known as Starship, or simply Ship. Both of these stages are powered by SpaceX’s next-gen Raptor engine — 33 for Super Heavy and six for Ship.
“More importantly, it is designed to be fully reusable, burning 80% liquid oxygen and 20% liquid methane (very low-cost propellant). This enables cost per ton to orbital space to be 10,000% lower than Saturn V,” the SpaceX CEO said.
Starship is the difference between being a multi-planet or single planet civilisation, added Musk.
In 2003, he said, “Our eventual upgrade path is to build the successor to Saturn V. A super-heavy lift vehicle that could be used for setting up a moon base or doing a Mars mission. That would be the holy grail objective.”
Earlier, Musk made a daring claim about the possibility of habitation on Mars following SpaceX team’s significant victory in their quest for affordable interplanetary travel.
Musk said that one million people will be able to live on Mars thanks to SpaceX’s recent feat of capturing a massive booster from Starship rocket for the first time.
Explaining further, the Tesla CEO in a post on X explained, “Getting the cost per ton to the surface of Mars low enough that humanity has the resources to make life multiplanetary requires a roughly 1000X improvement in rocket & spacecraft technology.”
Musk said that to build a city on Mars that can grow by itself likely requires at least a million tonnes of equipment, which would therefore require >$1000 trillion, an obviously impossible number, given that US GDP is only $29T.
“However, if rocket technology can be improved by 1000X, then the cost of becoming sustainably multiplanetary would drop to ~$1T, which could be spread out over 40 or more years, so,” he said.
Starship is designed to achieve a >1000X improvement over existing systems and, especially after booster catch and precise ocean landing of the ship, I am now convinced that it can work, he wrote.