SpaceX Has Updated Mars and Starship Plans

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Elon Musk has updated the Mars and Starship plans.

Starship and the Booster will eventually each be made about 20% more powerful. There will be versions by the end of the year that will be improved by about 5-10%.

The new Starship will not have heat shields around the engines. The new engines can withstand the higher temperatures without protection.

SpaceX has a 50-50 chance of getting refueling working in time for an unmanned launch to Mars at the end of 2026. They will then go with larger and larger mission every 26 months.

SpaceX plans to make about 1000 Starships every year and to make 5000 Starlink satellites per year. The number of Starlink satellites could increase to 10,000 per year.

11 thoughts on “SpaceX Has Updated Mars and Starship Plans”

  1. So when they go to Mars they need to bring lots and lots of soft wood pine. 2 x 4’s 2 x 6s 2 x 12’s you get the idea lots of nails screws and hammers. Milwaukee power tools and so on. lots and lots of lumber.

  2. To make any of this work, the refueling is key.
    To make refueling work, there simply must be some variation of semi-fast, full reusability of Starship and booster. This is is where the time plan doesn’t look so promising.
    They haven’t even made orbit nor controlled return yet, let alone catching of Starship.

    Once those 3 are reliable, there is the fast reusability thing. Looking at Falcon 9 boosters they have an average 20 – 30 days turnaround time with 9 days being the current record.

    Sure – SpaceX can have a larger number of boosters and Starships in a refurbishing queue in the beginning for refuelling missions for NASA jobs and one-offs to Mars etc.
    For mass transportation there must be like 2 orders of magnitude improvement.

  3. So, first flights testing reentry, with just opportunistic “No biggie if it ends up splattered over the landscape” payloads. Maybe just weigh it down with MRE’s and other durable random things the colonists might eventually appreciate.

    Then serious cargo on the next launch window to start building out the colony.

    And *maybe* relatively expendable one way passengers on the one after that? Older space nerds who don’t mind a one way ticket so long as they have a chance to accomplish something important? Until I got married I’d have volunteered for something like that in a heartbeat.

    I continue to think that at some point in this timeline, ideally as early as possible, we need a PARTIAL gravity lab in LEO, to test the long term biological effects of Martian gravity. We know that zero gravity is bad for health, we know that full gravity is fine, but what does the curve look like in between? If we need something close to Earth gravity for long term health, there may be better colonization targets than Mars, or we’ll need to plan on including large centrifuges in the colony plan.

    Building that lab would also allow a chance to do long duration life support testing under realistic circumstances, and even test out the accommodations for the Mars trip. After all, the passenger ships will likely pair up with tethers to produce martian level spin gravity, so that they arrive already acclimated to that acceleration.

    • Note: The obvious way to build that lab is to equip two starships as though they were going to Mars, only with extra medical gear, and put them together with a tether in a bolo arrangement for the gravity.

      By adjusting the fuel loads between them, one could even be at Mars gravity while the other was at Lunar gravity.

      You get your partial gravity testing, your spin gravity testing, long duration tests on all essential systems.

      • Upvote for that, though we might as well get our health data for lunar gravity with a moonbase, so we also get information on the geologic history of the moon and how to use off earth resources.
        Oddly, we really only need lunar & martian data for the solar system. The surface (or cloud top) gravity for solar system bodies cluster near values that differ by a ratio of about 2.5
        Jupiter: 25 m/s^2
        Venus Earth Saturn Uranus Neptune: All close to 10 m/s^2
        Mercury Mars: Both just under 4 m/s^2
        Luna Io Europa Ganymede Calisto Titan: all close to 1.6 m/s^2
        All other solar system bodies (sun excepted) have gravity well under lunar gravity & we will want rotating habitats nearby for exploration/exploitation of them.

        • In theory the sort of partial gravity lab I’m proposing ought to be feasible before the moon base, substantially cheaper, and the evacuation time in the event of any sort of emergency is shorter. But I’m really only proposing it for Martian gravity, and suggesting that we could get the lunar gravity research as nearly a freebie, since you need a counterweight, and it’s easy to arrange.

          Once we HAVE a Moon base, of course you’d do the research there, since you’d already be on the hook for the extra expense.

          I actually kind of like the idea of colonizing Venus using balloons; Breathable air is a good lifting gas in a CO2 atmosphere, and there’s an altitude where both the temperature and pressure are reasonable for humans, while the equatorial winds are actually fast enough that you’d experience a not unreasonable day length despite the actual “day length” on Venus being 243 Earth days.

          Also, there’s a stagnant atmospheric region near the poles where surface temperatures, while still excessive for colonization, are low enough that mining might be feasible using remote equipment hanging from floating facilities, similar to undersea mining here on Earth.

          Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune could host atmospheric colonies, too, but you’d have to import all heavier elements, and the delta V requirements are pretty brutal, would absolutely require nuclear rocketry.

          • I imagine a solid but nearly or barely buoyant carbon nanotube or aerographite would make a very good construction material for a permanent aerial base on Venus. Also easy to deploy: just bring it there in bulk or as a semi-assembled structure and drop it, cushioned by a disposable aeroshield, letting it fall until buoyancy taked the lead and makes it loiter, and then approach for enabling the habitation. You might need to coat it on some protective material for isolating it from the sulfuric acid, but in enough buoyant volumes that’s not a problem.

            The gas giants would be a bit harder, though, because their atmospheric hydrogen is already very light and their winds quite more violent.

            • For the gas giants you need hot air balloons, since there’s no lighter lifting gas. Your waste heat keeps you aloft.

              Well, actually, Jupiter’s atmospheric circulation is such that you could stay aloft perpetually using a glider, too.

  4. The Normandy disembark on Mars, basically.

    Good, this looks like the way to do it. No plat-a-flag, take-a-picture one-of-a-kind mission, but hundreds of reusable interplanetary craft going there and returning. The return catches my eye, given the plan includes some on the first trips. Are they going to carry the required Sabatier reactors for producing fuel in situ? In what form?

    But the public will have to be ready (and the right contracts or laws signed off) for allowing some failures and yeah, deaths. You can’t plan something like this and expect that all of them will work flawlessly, and they will also fail with people on them.

    • Use teleoperated bots to assemble everything.
      Then you can sit in comfortable 1G space station and extract the resources for a O’Niell cylinder.

      • Or develop AI capable of making and following long plans.

        If there was a Grok 4-5 copy on Mars with a detailed plan and the ability to improvise as long as things arise, always trying to keep the plan going, a whole different story would be told.

        But I imagine the first decades will still required humans for supervising or training the bots (and everybody else) in things they’ve never seen before.

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