What Elon Musk Did and Didn’t Reveal About SpaceX’s Starship Rocket
The New York Times
The founder of the private space company rehashed his broad vision of colonizing Mars, but he provided few clear details about when Starship would get to orbit.
On an outdoor stage in South Texas between screens with polished computer animations and a real gigantic shiny rocket behind him, Elon Musk provided his latest update on his dreams to send people to settle Mars on Thursday evening.
But while Mr. Musk’s presentation was vivid in detailing his vision of humanity’s interplanetary future, he was more circumspect about the operational details of the massive SpaceX rocket Starship that is central to those and other goals. The spacecraft must overcome numerous technical and regulatory hurdles before it can fly to orbit or fulfill a contract worth billions of dollars to land NASA astronauts on the moon, let alone colonize the red planet.
But on the stage on Thursday night, Mr. Musk said he thought that Starship would be capable of establishing a self-sufficient city on Mars, which he said would require taking a million tons of material there from Earth.
