SpaceX Starship To Be 500-Ft Tall To Prepare For Mission Mars: Elon Musk

Elon Musk usually delivers updates on Starship at least once a year in order to highlight the progress that the company is making toward its long-term plans of settling on Mars.

A view of SpaceX's Starship during flight test ahead of the actual launch.

The largest rocket in the world, SpaceX's starship is set to become even bigger now as the company continues its Project Mars. SpaceX founder Elon Musk told his employees earlier that the Starship will eventually be as tall as 500 feet (150 meters), roughly 20 per cent taller than the massive system aboard the Super Heavy rocket right now. Probably a piece of even bigger news in this aspect would be that due to the advances in reusability, each launch will now only cost around $3 million.

According to Musk, this is less than one-third of what a much smaller Falcon 1 rocket launch cost in 2004 (keeping inflation into account. Musk in a release said, "These are sort of unthinkable numbers. Nobody ever thought that this was possible, but we're not breaking any physics to achieve this. So this is within the bounds, without breaking physics. We can do this."

Delay In NASA-SpaceX's Artemis Program

Elon Musk usually delivers updates on Starship at least once a year in order to highlight the progress that the company is making toward its long-term plans of settling on Mars. Last year, the world witnessed three Starship launches, which solidifies the progress that it has made so far.

He did not address the delays in launching Starship which contributed to pushing back the launch date for the first moon landing under the NASA-led Artemis program.

SpaceX was selected as the vendor for the Artemis 3 landing mission, initially slated for 2025. In January, NASA opted to push back the launch to 2026 due to various technical issues. Apart from Starship readiness - requiring multiple successful launches before approval for astronaut flights - Artemis 3 faced delays due to sluggish spacesuit progress and Orion spacecraft issues, among other challenges.