Elon Musk Reveals SpaceX’s Starship Mars Plan To Place First Humanoid Robot On Red Planet in 2026!
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shared key details of the firm’s Starship program in a recent presentation he gave at the firm’s facilities in Boca Chica, Texas. Starship is the world’s largest rocket under development, and through it, SpaceX plans to place the first humans on Mars. Musk’s presentation focused on the rocket’s overall launch profile, production plans, future upgrades and plans to establish the first colony on Mars.
SpaceX Delays Starship In-Space Propellant Demonstration To 2026
SpaceX is currently building a new factory in Boca Chica that will form the backbone of Starship production. In his previous Starship discussions, Musk has shared that to deliver an adequate payload to Mars, SpaceX will have to fly thousands of Starships in a short time period when the shortest path between the two planets opens up. In his recent presentation, he revealed that, ultimately, SpaceX was “aiming to produce a thousand ships a year.”
The executive also revealed key details about SpaceX’s third-generation Starlink satellites, the Raptor 3 engine, and future iterations of the Super Heavy booster and the upper-stage Starship. According to him, “the version three satellites, making on the order of five thousand a year, maybe at some point closer to ten thousand a year, and those Starlink v3 satellites are each the size of, roughly a [Boeing] 737.”
Describing SpaceX’s eventual plans for Super Heavy booster reusability, Musk claims that the firm will be able to refly the rocket within an hour of landing. The booster comes back after five to six minutes of launch and lands on the launch mount for a propellant refill, he outlined. This takes “about thirty or forty minutes,” after which you “place the ship on top of it and in principle refly the entire booster every hour,” he said.
One key upgrade on future variants of the booster will be to its interstage. This is the region between the booster’s top and the ship’s engines. It’s designed to protect the booster from the ship engine exhaust at the time of stage separation. According to Musk, future next-generation Super Heavy boosters will be taller, and the interstage will ensure that the exhaust “from the ship engines can easily exit from the open struts in the interstage.”
The full Starship stack’s launch profile means that SpaceX has to fill the upper stage with propellant in Earth orbit. While SpaceX had initially planned to demonstrate it in 2025, the demonstration has now been delayed. The propellant transfer is also a key objective for NASA’s Artemis program, which has contracted SpaceX to land the first humans on the moon through Starship. Musk says the propellant transfer is “an important technology which we should hopefully demonstrate next year.”
Another key demonstration is the recovery of the Starship’s upper stage. Like the booster, SpaceX plans to catch the ship with the launch tower. Before the second-generation upper-stage ship’s multiple failures this year, Musk had opined that in the best-case scenario, SpaceX might attempt to catch the ship during Starship Flight 8. However, now, SpaceX hopes to “demonstrate later this year, maybe as soon as two or three months from now,” according to him.
Future Starships will feature SpaceX’s Raptor 3 engine. Musk’s presentation revealed that his firm had tested the engine 300 times. The Raptor 3 “is designed to require no base heatshield, saving a lot of mass on the bottom and actually improving reliability,” said Musk. He added that the reliability and the engine’s structure mean that “if there is, for example, a small fuel leak from the Raptor engine, it will simply leak into the existing flaming plasma and not really matter.”
“A future version” of Starship will have nine engines, revealed the executive. According to him, this version ” is the one that achieves key elements of rapid reliability and Reusability along with in-space propellant transfer.” SpaceX plans to fly five landers to Mars in 2026, with the first missions featuring Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot, shared Musk.
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
