Making Life Multiplanetary

What it is

On May 6, 2002, Elon Musk founded SpaceX around a single sentence: the company "was founded to make life multiplanetary." The story of how he got there is almost funny. He had tried to buy refurbished intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs, the long-range rockets of the Cold War) in Russia so he could fling a payload at Mars, the deal fell apart, and he walked away certain that the only way to bring down the price of space was to build the rocket himself.

Making life multiplanetary is the mission, and Starship is the machine. It is a fully reusable, two-stage, super heavy-lift rocket that stands about 120 meters tall, roughly a 40-story building, and 9 meters across, and it is built from stainless steel rather than the exotic, expensive composites most rockets use. It is the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built.

Why it exists

Think of it as an insurance policy written across geologic time. Elon Musk sees a self-sustaining city on Mars as a backup of civilization, a safeguard against any planet-scale disaster that could end the whole story if we stay on Earth alone. As he puts it, "Becoming multiplanetary is critical to ensuring the long-term survival of humanity and all life as we know it."

The deeper reason he gives is protecting the long-term survival of consciousness itself, extending the light of awareness beyond one fragile world. In Eric Jorgenson's "The Book of Elon," that mix of a far-horizon mission and a relentless focus on cost is the pattern that shows up again and again. The near-term payoff is simpler: a rocket cheap enough to make heavy launches routine.

How it works

Starship rides on a Super Heavy booster powered by 33 Raptor engines that burn liquid methane and liquid oxygen, a fuel pair Elon picked partly because methane can one day be made on Mars itself. Together those engines produce roughly 74 to 76 meganewtons of liftoff thrust, with each Raptor adding over 2.3 meganewtons. The upper stage carries six more Raptors, three tuned for sea level and three built for the vacuum of space.

The engines keep getting better, and the cost keeps coming down with them.

The big structural bet is stainless steel. The 2016 design, the Interplanetary Transport System, was 12 meters wide and made of carbon fiber. The 2017 BFR redesign shrank the vehicle to the 9-meter width it still uses, the stages got the names Starship and Super Heavy in 2018, and in 2019 SpaceX swapped carbon fiber for 301 stainless steel, which costs roughly 2 percent of what the composite did and can shrug off heat near 1,650 degrees Celsius. Cheaper, tougher, and far easier to mass-produce, it is one of those rare cases where the budget choice is also the better one.

Flying the same rocket again and again is where the savings live, but it comes with a tax, because bringing the booster and ship home costs you some of the weight you could otherwise carry.

Fully reusable, Starship is designed to lift 100 to 150 metric tons to low Earth orbit, and flown as a throwaway it can carry up to about 250 tons. The whole plan leans on refueling in orbit, where tanker Starships top off a Mars-bound ship once it is in space so it can carry that same 100 to 150 tons all the way to the surface of Mars.

Where it stands today

SpaceX has flown 12 full flight tests, from IFT-1 in April 2023 through IFT-12 in May 2026, and the pace has picked up sharply.

The achievement that stands out most is recovery. On IFT-5 in October 2024, the launch tower's "chopstick" arms caught the returning Super Heavy booster right out of the air, a feat SpaceX repeated on IFT-7 and IFT-8. IFT-9 flew a booster a second time for the first time ever. The same flights that looked like fireballs on social media were really a march toward reusing the hardware over and over, so that each launch needs fewer brand-new vehicles, and that turns Starship into a product line rather than a string of one-off launches.

Nothing says "routine" quite like catching a skyscraper-sized booster with a pair of metal arms.

What comes next

IFT-12, on May 22, 2026, flew the first Version 3 (Block 3) hardware: Booster 19 and Ship 39, the first flight from the new Pad 2 and the first on Raptor 3 engines. Booster 19's earlier March 18 ground test was a planned 10-engine static fire, since only 10 of the eventual 33 Raptors were installed at the time, and all of them lit before an early shutdown from a ground-side problem, with a full 33-engine fire following after. On the flight itself, all 33 booster engines lit at liftoff, but after the stages separated the booster flipped much faster than it should have, managed only a single engine on its landing burn, and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. Ship 39 reached space and splashed down in the Indian Ocean as planned. The FAA called it a mishap and grounded Starship while it investigated. So the V3 era opened with a working upper stage and a booster back on the drawing board, which is exactly how hard engineering goes, and Elon has turned that kind of learning curve into orbit before.

Beyond the test stand sits the real goal: roughly a million people on Mars by about 2050, carried by fleets of up to a thousand Starships launching during the Earth-Mars windows that open every two years when the planets line up. A self-sustaining city is estimated to need somewhere on the order of 3 to 10 billion dollars a year for decades, a program so large that SpaceX plans to pay for it mostly out of steady Starlink revenue rather than ticket sales.

The bottom line

Making life multiplanetary is the founding promise SpaceX has spent more than two decades working toward, one stainless-steel test flight at a time. Whether or not a city rises on Mars by mid-century, the reusable, mass-produced rocket built to get there is already rewriting the price of reaching orbit. This is Elon at his boldest, aiming humanity at a second planet, and history keeps siding with him.