SpaceX pushes to get Starship rocket ready for Mars by next year

Mint

26-05-2025

SpaceX is shifting personnel and resources to its powerful new rocket, hoping to have the vehicle ready for a Mars mission next year.
Elon Musk's space company is making an enormous bet on Starship, which stands roughly 400 feet tall at liftoff and remains in an experimental phase. SpaceX is aiming to address the technical challenges ahead with Starship while continuing to fly the operational spacecraft and rockets that made the company a powerhouse.
In recent months, employees have been moving into Starship roles, including some Dragon spacecraft staffers who were reassigned in mid-May, according to people familiar with the matter. SpaceX has also been making big investments in its complex in Texas for the vehicle, and has similar plans for Florida.
The company faces near-term pressure to show that Starship can function as Musk and other executives have promised. It is behind schedule on work preparing a variant of Starship for a National Aeronautics and Space Administration mission to the moon currently set for 2027, people familiar with those efforts have said.
This year, SpaceX struggled with back-to-back Starship flight tests that ended in explosions. The incidents disrupted airline traffic in Florida and the Caribbean region as debris fell.
SpaceX is planning another test flight of the vehicle Tuesday evening. In a statement Friday, the company said it had conducted extensive testing to understand the failure of its latest mission and made changes for the next one. Reaching its goals with Starship 'won't always come in leaps," SpaceX said.
'It's definitely been a rough start of the year for Starship," Shana Diez, an engineering executive at SpaceX, said in a post on X after the second recent explosion. A single issue can cause a launch to fail, she said, and when factoring in costs and time, 'the overall problem can feel quite daunting."
One of the Starship-related projects that SpaceX staff recently moved over to is called Starfall. It is tied to a military effort to one day use the vehicle to whisk military gear around the globe, the person familiar said.
Military officials and space companies for years have researched using rockets to rapidly move cargo. The idea is spacecraft could ferry large amounts of material to bases or remote locations an hour or so after launching and flying through space.
SpaceX in 2017 posted an animation online showing people in New York boarding a Starship on a barge and flying through space to Shanghai in 39 minutes, but executives haven't spoken much lately about so-called point-to-point Starship efforts.
The company said in a legal filing last year it aims to conduct a rocket-cargo mission for the Air Force where Starship would attempt to transport and land more than 66,000 pounds of government cargo. It then said it expected to receive about $149 million tied to further developing Starship for the cargo efforts.
Musk has been pushing SpaceX to try to launch a Starship spacecraft on an uncrewed mission to Mars next year.
Taking a shot at the red planet on that time frame would require SpaceX to overcome engineering obstacles. An advantage of possibly flying there in 2026 is that Earth and Mars will be closer together, making a flight easier.
One major challenge for any mission: in-orbit fueling. Rockets and spacecraft typically are loaded with all of their fuel on the ground, but SpaceX aims to fuel up Starships while they are in orbit for deep-space missions. Staffers have discussed Starship making a trip to Mars with three in-space refuels, people familiar with the matter said.
Transferring propellant in space at the scale SpaceX is proposing for Starship hasn't been done before, and the company hasn't attempted to move fuel between two vehicles in orbit. The propellants must remain at super-cold temperatures or they can boil off.
SpaceX's goal of flying to Mars next year might dovetail with the Trump administration's new priorities at NASA. In a recent budget proposal, the White House called for adding $1 billion in funding for Mars-focused efforts and large cuts across many other agency programs.
Musk founded SpaceX more than two decades ago to ultimately try to send people to the red planet, and has described making humanity multiplanetary as an animating feature of his life.
The chief executive of SpaceX, Tesla and other companies has said he wants to include a robot under development at Tesla on a Mars flight in 2026. 'Starship departs for Mars at the end of next year, carrying Optimus," Musk said in a post on X in March.
Write to Micah Maidenberg at [e-mail] and Becky Peterson at [e-mail]