SpaceX is gearing up for another Starship launch after three straight disappointing test flights.
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What’s the goal of SpaceX’s 10th Starship test flight? Right the ship.
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According to Musk, more than 1.8 million FSD have been pushed to Teslas.
Now imagine Musk hyping going to Mars 100 fold compared to FSD, and also promising those people that they’ll go down in history.
I don’t see that Musk will have any problems signing up a million people to go to Mars. However, getting them there is a different problem.
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If the currently nebulous plans to start building a colony on Mars becomes something of a reality it will take 100s to 1000s of Starships to leave each synod with Mars, which happens a little over every two years. The ships used will mostly be one way cargo ships. That is the currently stated reason for the manufacturing capacity / rate.
The shorter term realistic result of building the factory towards such productions volume is that it 1) gives you hardware to experiment with at reasonable costs and 2) forces you to design and build craft that can be reasonable manufactured in both time and cost.
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Back in the 1970s, when I was that age, we thought Mars was the next stop. Then came the cancellation of the final three planned Apollo lunar missions.
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1. Spacecraft, but also a surface hab, such as one needs on the surface of Mars.
2. An EVA suit, such as one needs on the surface of Mars.
3. Not one guy. Mueller was a lead engineer, if he was working on it so was his team.
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New Shepard and SS2 were built for billionaire joyrides so it makes sense that their respective billionaires did that. That was the whole point.
Dragon was built to bring cargo and crew to ISS. The billionaire joyrides are incidental, and only happen because they make SpaceX money.
Musk doesn't own a superyacht either. That doesn't mean he's afraid of sailing. He just doesn't see it as a good use of his time and resources.
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Have always cheered every space launch, even the Soviet ones. But have no love for the Muskrat, somebody else can do the gateway to space. Kaboom baby!!!!!!
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Missing Minute
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
Is this the sum total of evidence that SpaceX is working on non spacecraft requirements for a colony or is there more?
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The people focused on manufacturing are all engineers as well.
How exactly do you think 'manufacturers' improve on the Starship or the falcon 9?
I understand the Elon hate but let's not throw facts out of the window to service a narrative.
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I mean, one of the areas Elon is actually quite right about is that building a product is really all about building a production line, and you don't really understand the limits of your design until you're building lots of them, pushing them, and seeing where they fail. It's why Falcon 9s are now THE rocket, and everything else is a rounding error. And he's... enthusiastic... about making sure engineers spend time on the production line.
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I would argue that failure is inevitable when you take your eye off the ball. Musk hasn't even been looking in the right direction since he succumbed to the siren song of political power. Which is a shame. As much as I dislike the man, and I really dislike him, he was at one point capable of and acting as the leader of SpaceX.
And at that time shit was actually being accomplished. There were goals that were reasonably well articulated: build and perfect Falcon 9, check. Operationalize Starlink, check.
All that, to this observer, vanished when he started craving power for power's sake. It's destructive, we can see that. But the goals are not clear, they aren't achievable in a "git er done" sort of way. It's an aspirational, cheerleading sort of way, and we can see how effective it is.
What's worse is that it's happening concurrent with America's own lack of clarity, sinking into the same muck that turned our companies into chop shops.
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Voix des Airs
Ars Praefectus
How many of those million would be suitable candidates to be packed like sardines into Starships with nothing to do for who knows how long but at least, what?, nine months? And then do what on Mars?
I often get the impression that Musk views people who aren't him as NPCs.
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That was before he successfully tanked his reputation on multiple levels. He's not going to have that same credibility ever again.
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Musk never claimed that SpaceX was going to build the colony single-handedly. He always emphasized that SpaceX was mostly going to supply the transportation. He expected other gullible fools to build the actual habitats.
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A Starship which is essentially an overgrown Falcon, with a reusable first stage and expended second, would be useful for things like large scale deployments of Starlink or whatever. It’d suck for sending things to the Moon or Mars; that heavy upper stage really really needs in-orbit refueling for those missions. And that really needs the fully reusable capability.
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Since SpaceX doesn’t sell crypto, that would just indicate that you foolishly watched a scam stream that was probably repeating a previous test launch and presumably on Youtube, where there are no legitimate SpaceX direct streams.
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Not that it will likely do much good, but do report that stream as a scam, because it's a scam.
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Tims is running out because.... competition? Demand is falling? SpaceX is running out of cash?
Maybe the answer is on Bluesky.....
Maybe the answer is on Bluesky.....
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Copy the URLs and use FreeTube. I started doing that when YouTube started getting even more obnoxious, including demanding logins.
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The bigger they are the harder they fall. Musk puffed his empire up to absurd proportions with all his hot air and now the balloon is popping on all fronts.
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity
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Sounds like you've been watching one of the many fraudulent scammer streams that pop up around YouTube every time a Starship test flight is near. Learn your lesson, and next time be careful as to which channel you are perusing. Note that SpaceX's official YouTube channel hasn't published much of anything new for years, and that SpaceX's official live streams are exclusively hosted on X now - though you can also access and view them as embeds through SpaceX's official web site.
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Removing functioning RADAR and USS on the Tesla manufacturing in 2021 and then disabling the RADAR on all the prior Teslas, WAS NOT INNOVATING. He did it to cut costs, and has offered 3 different phony excuses for doing that, despite his engineering team telling him that was a bad move. He even fired those who continued to say that would significantly reduce the safety. He is an extreme narcissist, just like the new US Führer. And now he says, with no recognition of irony, new Tesla HW versions will include RADAR (both HW4 and HW5 support RADAR). Vision Only guarantees that the Tesla autonomous FSD will never even match good manual drivers, while summoning a Tesla in a parking lot has been shown to result in collisions with parked vehicles and even with the parking lot concrete lighting pedestals.*
https://insideevs.com/news/658439/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-autopilot-engineers-radar-removal/
https://www.teslaoracle.com/2023/06...ce-of-the-new-radar-in-hw4-equipped-vehicles/
https://electrek.co/2025/01/07/tesla-is-under-investigation-for-actually-smart-summon-crashes/
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/...o-smart-nhtsa-investigation-shows-245230.html
*Note that disabling the RADAR on vehicles sold with RADAR is also defrauding his customers!
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While Mush and his Elonvangelicals like to endlessly point this out, there have been multiple updates that caused things that used to work well to suddenly fail. For example, multiple times, an over the air update screwed up the originally working GPS navigation for many owners. In a most recent case (in this month) it would lose track of where you were and tell you to take turns that you took over a mile ago, when it also told you to take that turn the first time. And numerous other problems have occurred with some updates. His firmware QC really matches his factory QC, and he apparently thinks QC means Quit Complaining (he has a very high employee turnover).
https://ranwhenparked.net/why-is-my-tesla-location-not-updating/
View: https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaSupport/comments/18b0k9f/cameras_and_gps_stopped_working_after_firmware/
https://www.jalopnik.com/teslas-quality-control-is-so-bad-customers-are-taking-d-1851369990/
https://www.designgurus.io/answers/detail/why-tesla-is-losing-employees
https://www.industryweek.com/leader...cutive-turnover-worse-among-elon-musk-reports
etc...
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Once on Mars, they would be unpacked, then re-packed like sardines in cramped underground tubes. Maybe. Assuming the boring machines work on Mars, which is questionable.
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They won't work on Mars (unless extensively redesigned for that specific environment), since for instance like all other tunnel boring machines they critically depend on liquid water to act as a coolant, lubricant, dust suppressant, and possibly also a waste slurry transport medium. On Mars, liquid water instantly explodes into steam due to the exceptionally low ambient pressure. But good luck even supplying it in a liquid form to begin with, given the generally frigid ambient temperatures. Yet at the same time, ironically, it's also quite hard to shed waste heat on Mars - thanks to the very thin atmosphere, it's more like being up in space than down here on Earth - and yet TBMs are by their very nature rather prolific waste heat generators.
All that said, perhaps prospective Mars colonists could take advantage of already present subterranean lava tubes (which, thanks to relatively low gravity, can actually get much more cavernous than their siblings here on Earth.)
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You are confusing line workers - who train on pre-specified protocols and then follow them per the training like meat sack robots - with the engineers who create those protocols, monitor production performance and quality, and revise those protocols as necessary, or even partially or completely redesign the production lines or methods altogether, if and as warranted.
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I don't have any specific insight into SpaceX's decision making, but I can make some potential guesses based on how I would approach the problem if I were in charge of it. Basically, it boils down to certain tasks not really being parallelizable.
For example, the exact payload capacity of Starship is still not known. It is currently below the target capacity they want, and they're still trying to optimize things to get to where they want to be, but there is no guarantee that they will fully achieve that goal. If they design and build a full Mars habitation module now, they might just have to go and redesign or modify it later if it exceeds the capacity of the Starship, or if they have to change the way cargo is loaded/unloaded from the Starship. Essentially, it's too early in the process to really start optimizing the details of the habitation modules. This is one of the reasons that the vast majority of people here think Musk's timelines are pure bullshit (or "aspirational" if you want to be polite), even among people who think he is genuinely trying to establish a Mars colony.
Realistically, the first steps are to demonstrate that you can:
A) Land Starships on Mars with some reasonable success rate.
B) Successfully unload some cargo from the Starships onto the surface of Mars
C) Quantify the maximum mass and dimensions of the cargo you can unload onto the surface of Mars.
Until you can do all that, designing the habitation modules that you expect people to actually live in during an extended stay on Mars is premature. They have not yet achieved these steps, so designing the habitation modules is still premature. They don't yet have a way to put a prototype hab module on Mars to test how it holds up to Martian conditions, so there's no point in building a prototype yet. They tend to develop things in an iterative manner, and you can't really do that until you have the capacity to test the first iteration.
It would absolutely make sense to have some rough preliminary concepts of what you might eventually design and build, with some napkin math of the approximate mass and dimensions (and I'd be pretty surprised if various engineers at SpaceX hadn't discussed these ideas to some extent), but as far as putting major effort into an actual detailed design, or actually building prototypes, it seems premature to me.
Assuming they do eventually complete at least steps A and B above, it wouldn't surprise me if they slapped together some kind of prototype module that was kind of an "extended duration" version of the Dragon capsule that they could just set on Mars (without any actual people in it) and see if it could survive and maintain life support systems, power, etc for a few years on the Martian surface. See what works, what fails, etc, and incorporate that information into a more complete design for the next iteration.
As I see it, there are a lot of steps that need to happen before actually putting people on Mars, but there are serious limits to how much you can parallelize them. To a significant extent, you need to get data back on the early steps before you can really proceed with the later ones in detail. The fact that SpaceX doesn't seem to be visibly doing major work on habitation modules (in the sense of building hardware), tells me that at least someone at SpaceX realizes that they don't yet have all the data they need to properly inform that work. The most amazing, perfect Mars hab in the world is useless until you actually have a way to get it to Mars.
Proving that you can actually put large payloads on Mars for a reasonable cost is a prerequisite for any kind of major activity on Mars. It makes no real sense for anyone (SpaceX, investors wanting to invest in SpaceX, or third-party companies or governments) to put much effort/resources into designing big things to put on Mars until they know they can actually put them there.
This means that within the next 3-4 years, the most likely case for Starship (assuming they can get it working) is that they launch a bunch of Starlink satellites and get the general launch and reuse reliability up, demonstrate refueling, and attempt some unmanned demonstration landings on the Moon and possibly on Mars (and my guess is that they'll have some landing failures along the way).
If/when they actually put a payload safely on the surface of Mars, they might start getting serious about trying to build all the other stuff needed for long term habitation, and they will probably try to partner with NASA (assuming it still exists by that time) to help fund that mission, with NASA actually running the mission, and SpaceX being a contractor that supplies transportation and possibly some other components. This is all stuff that will take significant time (and would need Congressional buy-in if NASA is involved), and won't really be able to start seriously until Starships are putting payloads on Mars, which is why most people roll their eyes at Musk's timelines, even if they believe he's actually being honest about his goal of human habitation on Mars.
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Thanks for mentioning the height also in meters rather than just in American Eagles.
123 meter is massive. That is the height of the cathedral tower in Antwerp, Belgium.
Without it, I would not have realised the scale, so thanks again.
123 meter is massive. That is the height of the cathedral tower in Antwerp, Belgium.
Without it, I would not have realised the scale, so thanks again.
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It's a TBM. It's not on the surface, and wouldn't be subject to low surface pressure. It would presumably be producing a gas seal behind it on the tunnel as it is moving along, and the soil it is digging through in front would have relatively low permeability. There's no reason you couldn't have significant pressure within the tunnel.
You wouldn't be shedding it to atmosphere. You would be shedding it to the tunnel walls.
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Google seemingly have become fussy over the amount of traffic that's permitted to emanante from a single IP address. A VPN load would effectively concentrate a load of traffic. I guess their thinking could be that "attacks" are more likely to have such a profile, and want to be reassured that the traffic comes from a known client user. Or, there could be a more shadowy reason...
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It’s trivial for any real attack to be routed through various botnets. There’s no reason to think an attack would come from any single address. It’s far more likely you could see heavy single-address traffic from legitimate users doing legitimate things Google doesn’t want to happen, like escaping geofencing or masking traceable usage patterns.
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Indeed so, it feels unachievable for many commercial, technological, medical, reasons. Never mind the fact that the rocket itself isn't working. We don't even know how to stay alive for a journey of that duration in space outside of LEO, and in fact we know there's a pretty solid chance of getting fried by a solar storm on the way.
I wonder though what the situation in law is. Companies are a bit like "a person" in law. Presumably if such a portrayal is accurate, the "company" could be subject to laws about treason, etc. in the same way a citizen would be.
It is interesting that he's not been on top of his own rocket yet. In fact, has any SpaceX staffer been on one yet? Back in the early days of aviation, aircraft designers made a public show of riding in their own planes to show "it's good enough for me". However, I think we're beyond the point where anyone could reasonably question the reliability of Falcon 9.
Mind you, last time he was at the controls of "the vehicle of his dreams" he wrecked it (his McLaren F1). Perhaps he's still having nightmares over that.
Boeing - when the 747 took off for the first time - got its test pilots to wear ordinary business suits instead of flight suits and helmets, simply to portray an image of confidence (when in fact the plane was far from ready!). They were so close to commercial disaster they needed to fool those who could close down the project into believing that it was nearly ready. Fortunately the aircraft held together and the engines didn't quit, and the 747 went on to become a magnificent aircraft.
This shows one of the problems of how commerce / finance interacts with engineering; the former is prone to making decisions that are irrational, because it knows so little of the latter and cannot see "value" until revenues start to flow. The problem is that society needs engineering to succeed, but too often the engineering is curtailed by those who have no qualifications to judge its progress.
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