Making Life Multiplanetary

What it is

Elon Musk incorporated SpaceX on March 14, 2002, with the stated goal of making life multiplanetary: a self-sustaining human presence on another world. He came to it after trying to buy refurbished intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs, the long-range rockets of the Cold War) in Russia to send a small payload to Mars. The talks fell apart, and he concluded that the only way to cut the price of reaching space was for SpaceX to build its own rockets.

SpaceX's machine for that goal is Starship, a fully reusable, two-stage rocket that stands 124 meters tall in its Version 3 form, about the height of a 40-story building, and 9 meters across. It is the tallest and most powerful rocket ever flown.

Why it exists

Elon Musk's argument is survival. He wants a self-sustaining city off Earth so that a disaster on this planet, natural or man-made, could not end human civilization.

He also frames the goal as protecting consciousness: SpaceX's 2026 initial public offering prospectus commits the company "to extend the light of consciousness to the stars." The nearer payoff is a rocket cheap enough to make heavy launches routine.

How it works

Starship's Super Heavy booster runs on 33 Raptor engines that burn liquid methane and liquid oxygen, a fuel pair Elon Musk chose partly because methane can be made on Mars from carbon dioxide in the air and water ice in the ground.

SpaceX first showed the Mars ship in 2016 as the Interplanetary Transport System, a 12-meter-wide carbon-fiber design meant to carry 100 or more people per trip. It shrank to 9 meters in 2017 and switched to stainless steel in 2019, becoming the Starship flying today.

Fully reusable, Starship is designed to lift 100 to 150 metric tons to low Earth orbit; flown as a throwaway, it could carry about 250 tons.

A Mars trip depends on refueling in orbit: tanker Starships would top off a Mars-bound ship after launch so it could carry that same 100 to 150 tons all the way to the surface.

Where it stands today

SpaceX has flown 14 Starship flight tests since April 2023, and Flight 14, on September 28, 2026, was the first to reach orbit.

For a Mars program, recovery matters most. On Flight 5 in October 2024, the launch tower's mechanical arms caught the returning Super Heavy booster in midair, and SpaceX repeated the catch on Flights 7 and 8. Flight 9 reflew a booster for the first time. Every reused booster is one fewer to build, and a city on Mars would need ships and boosters that fly many times.

Flight 12, on May 22, 2026, debuted the larger Version 3 vehicles. The ship reached space and splashed down in the Indian Ocean as planned, the booster came down in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reviewed the flight before Starship flew again. Flight 13 followed in July.

What comes next

In March 2025 Elon Musk expected Starship to leave for Mars at the end of 2026:

In February 2026 he changed the order. SpaceX would build a self-growing city on the Moon first, he said, because ships can leave for the Moon every 10 days while launch windows to Mars open only every 26 months, and work on a Mars city could start in five to seven years. The long-range goal has stayed the same: about a million people on Mars, carried by fleets of up to 1,000 Starships and paid for mostly with Starlink revenue.

The bottom line

A city on the Moon, and later on Mars, depends on flying Starship cheaply and often. After 14 flights, SpaceX has caught and reflown boosters, and reusing a ship and refueling one in orbit are the next milestones.