SpaceX is building a factory to churn out a Starship, the most powerful and most advanced launch vehicle in history, capable of taking 150 tons to Mars – every 72 hours. Elon Musk plans to get costs down to $5 million per rocket.
Compare that to NASA and its Space Launch System (SLS), the big rocket that the space agency has been developing for a decade and for which Boeing only recently completed a single core stage. This core stage is about 15 meters taller than Starship, but lacks its complexity. NASA will, in fact, toss each SLS core stage into the ocean after a single use. Moreover, Boeing doesn’t have to make the engines, as the rocket uses 40-year-old space shuttle main engines. Despite this, and with nearly $2 billion in annual funding from NASA, Boeing’s stretch goal for building core stages is 1-2 pr year… some time in the mid-2020s.
SpaceX’s stretch goal is to build 1-2 Starships a week, this year, and to pare back construction costs to as low as $5 million each! It doesn’t get much more exciting and ambitious than that.
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