X/@SpaceX
Recently, some really big news were dropped by SpaceX about their Starbase Texas hub on the future of interplanetary travel, and, well-this is not really a space program! Such insane space visuals of the South Texas facility and outlining crazed plans fuelled by sci-fi-now suddenly they’re real.
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The video opens up to visuals marking the evolution of Starbase Texas from almost nothing-realization of “gateway to Mars,” as Musk puts it-in just five or six years. It has been fitted with two huge launch pads and a gigantic rocket factory, basically churning out Starship prototypes every few weeks. The craziest part about this so-called-incredible thing is that anyone can just drive down a public highway and get a good look at these things being worked on. Try that with NASA in the 1960s.
Musk casually placed 1,000 Starship production per annum as a target. Let that sink in: Three ships a day! Each bigger than a Boeing 747. The mind boggles that Boeing and Airbus do not even produce as many commercial airliners combined in a year. To realize this giant vision, they’re building what is probably going to be the largest structure in the world for the Gigabay facility to enable them in this insane rate of production.
It then continues with the deep dive into the point of this entire crazy engineering enterprise-life multiplanetary. Musk sees it as the last insurance policy for civilization. “Any given civilization is likely to last maybe 10 times longer if it is a multiplanet civilization,” he says, mentioning everything from nuclear war to asteroid impacts as threats. The idea: A self-sustaining Mars colony that can keep going even if Earth is knocked out.
In the first steps toward this insane goal, SpaceX is building insane technology. Like catching massive rockets in the air with giant chopsticks (the new name for the launch tower arms). They have, in fact, caught the massive Super Heavy booster multiple times already-who thought that was even remotely possible? Then comes catching the Starship itself.”‘ It could be in a matter of months. The whole idea is crazy-fast reuse, theoretically reflying a booster in an hour or two.”
And then there’s the new Raptor 3 engine that Musk calls “alien technology.” Apparently, industry experts never believed it existed when they first set eyes on it because the design seemed incomplete. And now this thing is literally blazing away at world record efficiency levels. Its advancements are so brilliant that it doesn’t even require a heat shield: where fuel leakage would just burn away harmlessly in the plasma of the engine.
Angling refuel (basically space gas stations) and a clean-sheet design for reusable heat shield are other technologies essential to his goals. That heat shield is particularly difficult because nobody has ever constructed one that can take multiple reentries without chronic repairs lasting months. Musk says it might take years to nail it, but he’ll prove it’s physically possible.
The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary: an update from @elonmusk on SpaceX’s plan to reach Mars pic.twitter.com/d2cnsVKK80
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 29, 2025
And, in true Musk-style excitement, he left us with a vision of humanity planting the flag beyond Mars-into the asteroid belt, into the moons of Jupiter, eventually back to other stellar systems at large. “That way we can be out there among the stars making science fiction no longer fiction,” says Musk with his signature flourish.
Some really interesting comments are coming in. One excellent user said, “This is either the start of something incredible or the most expensive midlife crisis in history,” which pretty much sums up the awe and doubt that Musk’s plans often generate. Another one joked, “So when do we get the SpaceX amusement park?” concerning the site being open to the public.
More seriously, someone pointed on, “The math actually checks out on producing that many ships if you compare it to car factories.” That means that Musk is taking his mass production approach from Tesla and actually applying it to getting people into space-this is something the traditional aerospace has never tried.
One way or another, some may always question the realism of Musk’s timelines, but one thing is for sure: SpaceX is working on a scale with ambition that makes every other space program look quaint, and their ambitions are far-reaching. They’re not just building rockets; they are trying to change the basic way humans interact with space. Plus, they’re doing it in public with a two-lane highway running directly next to the launch pad, with anyone able to park and watch! That’s what I call a real revolution from what space exploration used to be.
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“They’re going to be the most important thing that humanity has ever done or the most spectacular failure. I want front-row seats no matter what.” In a nutshell, 2024 encapsulates everything that is SpaceX: inspiring, terrifying, and impossible to look away from.
This story originally appeared on Celebrityinsider
