Why Does SpaceX Want To Make 100 Starships Per Year?

Why Does SpaceX Want To Make 100 Starships Per Year?

SpaceX has some very ambitious plans for the future. This includes going to the Moon, Mars, and even further. However, the private company not only wants to visit planets like Mars but set up a base and colony. To do this in a timely manner they will need a lot of cargo capacity and launch vehicles.

SpaceX wants to build 100 Starships a year to make Mars colonization possible. A large number of Starships would increase not only the weight capacity but also the number of trips possible between the planets. With around a 6 month journey one way having a lot of Starships would be necessary.

Starship is meant to be one of the biggest and most powerful rockets in the world but even it can’t do it alone. A lot needs to happen on the martian surface prior to a colony of humans being able to support themselves. A lot of Starships could make what seems like an impossible goal possible.

What Is Starship’s Carrying Capacity?

Starship is massive standing 120m tall and 9m wide. The majority of the space within Starship’s frame is just for propellant storage. Practically all of the booster Super Heavy and around two-thirds of the upper stage are just for propellant. Even with the majority of Starship being propellant storage it still has a large area for cargo or even humans on the Starship upper stage. This mass amount of propellant storage takes up a lot of room but allows the rocket to lift hundreds of tons into low Earth orbit and beyond. Specifically, one Starship is meant to be capable of bringing 100 plus tons into LEO. The propellant goes straight towards the large array of engines on the bottom of Starship.

In current prototypes, the Super Heavy booster BN4 has 29 Raptor engines. Future models are expected to have just over 30. SpaceX’s Raptor engines combined with the propellant are capable of launching Starship off the Earth and into space. In this process, Super Heavy does the majority of the work. However, after the booster disconnects the upper stage Starship will light its engines until in the correct orbit around Earth. At this point, Starship is no longer full of propellant. To get into orbit a lot has been used. To increase the distance Starship can go and the amount of payload it can bring SpaceX came up with a unique idea. The company is planning to refill Starship in orbit. The rocket will meet up with another Starship in orbit, connect, and then refill the original Starship with propellant until it’s full. This increases the payload capacity to distant planets such as Mars.

Why Build 100 Starships A Year?

Cargo Capacity – As I mentioned before Starship is already one of the biggest and most powerful rockets ever built. However, building a colony on Mars will require megatons of supplies, humans, and more. A colony on Mars will need a lot before it is self-sustaining. Some of the biggest requirements are supplies for creating propellants, shelters, carrying humans, food, water, and much more. Each could easily fill a single Starship with plenty more supplies needed. Starting with creating propellant which is necessary for the trip back. Once Starships land on Mars SpaceX wants to use the natural resources in the atmosphere and ice to create propellant for the trip back. This infrastructure for a propellant plant would need to be brought over in cargo Starships. With the addition of all the other necessary items I listed combined with even more, it becomes clear why SpaceX needs so much weight carrying capabilities. Elon Musk has mentioned in tweets that megatons per year to orbit are necessary for life to become multi-planetary. This is especially the case when travelling hundreds of millions of miles away to Mars.

Number Of Trips Possible – The amount of weight the Starship can bring is very important but so are the number of trips. A single Starship is very powerful but can’t do it alone. If SpaceX were to create 100 Starships a year then in one decade they could have 1000 operational Starships. Elon said in another tweet that “building 100 Starships/year gets to 1000 in 10 years or 100 megatons/year or maybe around 100k people per Earth-Mars orbital sync”. He also specifically talks about launching 3 Starships a day which would mean almost 1000 Starship launches a year. Starship constantly launching increases not only the speed but the cargo as well. This large number of trips would mean humans and needed supplies could be launching off Earth headed to Mars 3 times a day. This is a very ambitious goal but it needs to be if humans want to become multi-planetary.

Speed – The final reason SpaceX wants to build 100 Starships a year is for speed. A single Starship could colonize Mars, it would just take hundreds of years. Elon has mentioned many times before that he wants to see Mars colonization within his lifetime and maybe even go to the planet. You can see in Starship’s current development this goal of quick construction and testing. Within the last few years, Starship has evolved in almost every aspect. Starship development has been some of the most innovative and fastest progress ever seen in the space industry. This is the same reason why so many Starships are wanted. The more Starships capable of launching and heading to Mars the faster the colonization process will happen. Each year as SpaceX constructs more and more Starships the process will become faster and faster. With the benefit of Starship being fully reusable each new addition will only benefit the company in many different ways.

Can SpaceX Build 100 Starships A Year?

Building 100 Starships in a year is no easy task. This comes out to constructing 1 Starship about every 3 days. While SpaceX is very fast now it will need to speed up its production significantly. To do this the company would need to increase the size of their current production site or create a new one, and also likely add the addition of robots. Increasing the size of Starbase or creating more productions sites is necessary. The current Starbase location is building a Starship every month or so. They do this by working ahead and constructing future Starship models while testing current models. This helps them keep the production going to constantly create launch vehicles to test. To create 100 in a year they would need to expand this operation significantly. The addition of robots would also likely happen. Already in Boca Chica, multiple robots have been spotted either welding sections or installing heat shielding. In the future, it’s possible SpaceX could get ahold of a lot more complex robots and speed up the production process.

Conclusion

The trip to Mars is a very difficult one, to say the least. At over 100 million miles away the journey is very dangerous and long. Just getting to the planet is a feat much less setting up a base and colony. SpaceX wants to build 100 Starships a year to colonize the red planet in a timely manner. A large number of Starships will increase the cargo capacity, the number of trips possible, and speed up the process a lot. Each reason encourages the private company to build 100 Starships every year. It will be very hard to produce a Starship every 3 days but SpaceX is constantly improving and working towards its lofty goals. As time goes on we will have to wait and see what SpaceX is capable of.