--- title: "Elon Musk: I Can Build a Martian City With 1,000 Starships" description: "SpaceX CEO Elon Musk elaborated on his extremely ambitious plans to establish a sustainable settlement on Mars by sending 1,000 Starship rockets." date: "2019-11-08" modified: "2019-11-08" authors: - name: "Victor Tangermann" job_title: "Senior Editor" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/victor" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-mars-city-1000-starship" categories: - "Elon Musk" - "Future Society" - "Space" - "SpaceX" - "Starship" - "The Industrialists" tags: - "elon musk" - "mars" - "Starship" - "the digest" --- # Elon Musk: I Can Build a Martian City With 1,000 Starships ![SpaceX CEO Elon Musk elaborated on his extremely ambitious plans to establish a sustainable settlement on Mars by sending 1,000 Starship rockets.]() *\Image: Victor Tangermann\* ## A Thousand Ships In one of his trademark Twitter reply conversations on Thursday, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk elaborated on his extremely ambitious plans to establish a sustainable settlement on Mars — a vision his space company first [laid out]() about two years ago. "A thousand \[Starships\] will be needed to create a sustainable Mars city as the planets align only once every two years," [Musk wrote](). ## Mars Base Alpha Musk said that with roughly 100 vehicles, each carrying 100 tons, SpaceX could ferry "10 million tons of payload to orbit per year." Even with that planetary assembly line in place, building a Martian city will take a while. "So it will take about 20 years to transfer a million tons to Mars Base Alpha, which is hopefully enough to make it sustainable," Musk [added](). That's significantly more than "current global payload to orbit capacity" of about "500 tons per year, of which \[SpaceX's Falcon rocket\] is about half," according to [another tweet](). ## Tiny Steps It's a grand vision. In true Musk fashion, the CEO has set himself an ambitious timeline to start making trips to the Red Planet. If absolutely everything goes according to plan, the company wants to start sending astronauts to the [Moon in 2022]() and [Mars in 2024.]() SpaceX will also have to perfect its massive Starship vehicle first. While SpaceX has made some preliminary steps in building a [massive prototype](), a first crewed test has yet to be scheduled. **READ MORE:** [Elon Musk says building the first sustainable city on Mars will take 1,000 Starships and 20 years]() \[*TechCrunch*\] **More on Starship:** *[Elon Musk: SpaceX Launches Will Cost 1% of Current NASA Launches]()* ## Author I've been at Futurism since 2017, where my role has evolved to encompass design, writing, and increasingly editing. I've always been fascinated by space exploration and advanced transportation, which I've leaned into by interviewing luminaries in those fields while closely following the dimensions of policy and regulation that allow next-generation projects to succeed -- or, sometimes, to fail. I'm also keenly interested in the effects of generative AI on society, policies, and democratic institutions, as well as clean energy, physics and biology, and the vagaries of tech leadership. My work for Futurism has been cited by publications including Ars Technica, Gizmodo, PC Magazine, Jalopnik, Fox News, and the New York Post. I spent my childhood living in locations including Manila, the Philippines, and Geneva, Switzerland, attended McGill University, and now live in Toronto, Canada. Before Futurism I worked at AskMen and a small photography studio. In my free time, I'm an avid gardener, foodie, and craft beer lover, as well as a maker of artisanal hot pepper sauces. I have a magnificent dog named Freida. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()