Elon Musk to build enormous Texas ‘gigabay' to store 1,000 Starships
SpaceX will build the 'biggest structure in the world' to house up to 1,000 of its 400ft-tall Starship rockets per year, Elon Musk has claimed.
The Tesla billionaire and world's richest man laid out his vision for 'making life multiplanetary' in an update at SpaceX's Starbase in Texas.
Speaking to staff last night, Mr Musk said the company planned to build a 'gigabay', which he said would be 'a truly enormous structure'.
He said the building, designed for 1,000 Starships per year, would be 'by some measures the biggest structure in the world'.
The first so-called gigabay would be built in Texas, with a further facility in Florida as SpaceX seeks to launch multiple rockets per day in order to reach and colonise Mars.
Mr Musk has said humans must colonise the Red Planet to avoid potential extinction risks, such as nuclear war or an asteroid strike, and that the colony would need to become self-sustaining.
He said: 'Having two strong, self-sustaining planets will be critical for the long-term survival of civilisation.'
The billionaire further claimed the company's Super Heavy booster rockets would one day be able to fly missions 'every hour, maybe every two hours give a bit of extra time'. The Super Heavy boosters are the first stage of the Starship rocket. They are designed to be reusable, falling back to Earth after launching.
He added SpaceX would ultimately need to launch 1,000 to 2,000 rockets to Mars in every two-year window to carry the cargo needed to set up a colony.
Mr Musk is known for his bold claims and ambitious timelines, including his vision of sending humans to Mars by 2029. He said its first mission could include landing an Optimus robot on Mars.
On Tuesday night, Mr Musk's company undertook a ninth test flight of Starship, the world's most powerful rocket. The test saw the first re-use of its Super Heavy booster, recycling a rocket body that had previously returned to Earth and been caught by a pair of 'chopsticks' on its landing tower.
However, the Starship second stage went into a spin as it returned to Earth, breaking up over the Indian Ocean.
Mr Musk has promised to launch another Starship test mission within a few weeks.
Nasa is planning to use SpaceX's megarocket for a manned mission to the Moon as soon as 2027, returning humans to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.
On Thursday, Mr Musk revealed new designs for SpaceX's Starship, which he said would be 'taller' and have a redesigned separation mechanism.
He said future generations of its Starship would be 465ft tall and have twice the payload capacity of the Saturn V rocket that conducted the original Moon missions.
The billionaire added that his ambition was that 'anyone who wants to move to Mars can do so', which he said would be the 'best adventure that anyone could possibly do'.
He added there was a '50/50' chance SpaceX would launch an uncrewed Starship mission at the end of 2026, when Mars is at the closest point in its orbit to Earth.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
41 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Funky little Arizona town is hailed the 'new Roswell' after strange UFO sightings
An Arizona town with fewer than 10,000 residents is being dubbed the new Roswell after becoming one of the top spots in the US for UFO sightings. The desert town of Sedona, which is located approximately 180 miles outside of Phoenix, sits in both Coconino and Yavapai Counties, which had a combined 484 UFO sightings between 2000 and 2023, according to an Axios report. These numbers put the area well above the national average of 34 people per 100,000. Psychic and UFO tour guide John Polk, 56, told that he sees extraterrestrial activity nightly from his home in Sedona, where he's lived for the last eight years. The native Floridian told 'There's tons of activity. It's easy to see it.' He believes Sedona is such a high-traffic area for UFOs due to the vortexes the city is known for. Sedona is also a very spiritual place and is known as the 'door to the world' due to vortexes that are believed to open portals to other dimensions and provide healing energy. Polk said Sedona has quartz along the ley lines - invisible gridlines that often fall into triangles that are believed to carry powerful energy - that help build electromagnetic energy that creates electricity, and ultimately, a pathway for ETs. 'I believe that's what's happening in Sedona,' Polk told 'They're traveling over the gridlines. 'The better the energy, the more you'll see.' The Daytona Beach native also noticed a lot of UFOs seem to appear and then suddenly disappear in thin air and he believes that's due to the mythical ley lines and that aliens are using them to slip between dimensions. He explained it like turning stations on a radio, which is done by change frequency and vibrations. 'I think that's what they can do,' he said. 'Everything is about vibrations and frequency.' Polk regularly leads tour groups of 20 to 50 people and prepares for a tour by meditating to bring the best results. He says that UFOs 'seem to follow' him. 'You'd see stuff whether I was here or not. But when I am there, you see a lot more because I know how to work the energy out there,' he said. For Polk, who moved to the city to live with his aunt who had breast cancer, he's always believed in UFOs and had his first encounter when he was around 15 or 16. While in his bed in Florida, he saw something that looked like the moon but was moving over the ocean. After blacking out, he claims he awoke to find three four-foot creatures standing on his balcony peering into the glass. They eventually came into his room before he blacked out again. 'I totally believed in them my whole life,' Polk said. His mother, who is also a psychic, believed in aliens too and he says she worked adjacently to the FBI for many years. She was privy to confidential information and a lot of what she told him growing up then came true, he claimed. His father, a university president, was always a skeptic, but that hasn't stopped Polk from inviting ETs in with 'love, light and consciousness'. Sedona has been likened to Roswell, New Mexico, which has the most famous potential alien spotting area in the US. An extraterrestrial spacecraft allegedly crashed there in July 1947 and many conspiracy theorists believe aliens were captured by the government and the military attempted to cover up the incident. The area is a hotspot for UFO sightings, with 92 residents per 100,000 spotting one between 2000 and 2023, according to Axios. There have also been claims that Sedona has an 'alien base' hidden just outside the town in a desolate area, The Daily Express reported. 'There's a base there where the crafts are, there's a number of them high in the mountains in remote areas of the planet and they're here now and they're extraordinarily distressed about the state of affairs [of humanity],' lawyer Danny Sheehan, who has worked on UFO whistleblowers cases, told The Express. He claimed 'huge, seven feet tall, extraordinarily skinny, thin, kind of bowed over and reminding people of a praying mantis' people live inside the base. The paranormal was not associated with Sedona until the 1970s when psychic Paige Bryant visited the town and declared certain places were vortexes. 'She was not drawing from anything other than what she said she intuited from the land and she described these as places that had a spiritual or mystical type of energy emanating from specific spots in around Sedona,' McGivney told radio show KJZZ. 'And, you know, coincidentally, she was not like a wilderness backpacker. So all the vortexes are conveniently one mile from the road.' She was not the first person to feel the special power of Sedona, but she was the first to name the experience. Before her the psychic researcher Dick Sutphen brought groups of people to the town for spiritual retreats to help them experience the psychic energy emitting from the place. Dennis Andres and his mother visited the city when he was moving to studying at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, he told Arizona State University. When they came across a rock formation in Bell Rock, he found himself getting out of the car to climb and as he went higher, he felt better. 'We asked people if something was happening in Sedona. And they would always respond it is the vortex,' he told the university. 'Sedona is a place of spiritual energy. We cannot measure it with mechanical devices; we can only measure it with the human body. I can explain why some people feel this energy and others do not. You do not have to believe in it, and you do not have to reject it either.'
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Musk's DOGE took control of the U.S. Institute of Peace. It brought roaches and rats to D.C. headquarters, court docs say
The head of the United States Institute of Peace says its Washington, D.C. headquarters near the Lincoln Memorial was left to rot after billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency took it over in March, resulting in water damage, graffiti – and, worse yet, an infestation of roaches and rats. After DOGE replaced the independent, fully government-funded nonprofit's board with MAGA loyalists and fired the entire staff, Musk's crew left it with a 'level of staffing… woefully insufficient to properly protect and maintain' the $500 million Moshe Safdie-designed concrete-and-glass structure, according to a May 23 affidavit filed in D.C. federal court by USIP President and CEO George Moose. 'Vermin were not a problem prior to March 17, 2025, when USIP was actively using and maintaining the building,' Moose's affidavit states. The filing, which is part of a broader legal action by USIP in an attempt to regain full control of the organization, was first reported on Friday in the weekly Court Watch newsletter. The office, which is congressionally funded but is not part of the U.S. government, was established in 1984 by Ronald Reagan with a stated mission to advance international stability and conflict resolution. Still, shortly after he was sworn in for his second term as president, Donald Trump issued an executive order taking aim at USIP as 'unnecessary.' On Friday, March 14, Moose, a career diplomat who served as U.S. Ambassador to Benin and Senegal in West Africa, was abruptly terminated by the White House. He went back to the office on Monday and was removed from the USIP offices by police and replaced by Kenneth Jackson, a DOGE administrator, a move Moose immediately vowed to fight. Speaking to reporters outside after he was shown the door, Moose dubbed USIP's unilateral annexation 'an illegal takeover by elements of the executive branch of a private nonprofit corporation,' saying it had been 'very clear that there was a desire on the part of the administration to dismantle a lot of what we call foreign assistance.' On May 19, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled that the DOGE seizure of USIP was unlawful, and ordered Moose and his staff reinstated. In handing down her opinion, Howell said Trump's 'efforts here to take over an organization… represented a gross usurpation of power and a way of conducting government affairs that unnecessarily traumatized the committed leadership and employees of USIP, who deserved better.' The following day, Moose became concerned after hearing from USIP employees that the building's condition had been allowed to deteriorate, his affidavit states. With the help of his attorneys, and following Judge Howell's order, Moose arranged to get back into USIP headquarters on May 21. 'When my team and I arrived, the only persons in the building were two security guards and a small cleaning crew,' he says in the affidavit. 'In my experience, that level of staffing is woefully insufficient to properly protect and maintain the building.' However, Moose told reporters that, at first glance, nothing immediately seemed amiss. 'We just did a quick walk-through – externally, visibly, things look to be in pretty good shape,' he said. 'I didn't see anything, any destruction, if you will, no damage that I can see that is visible.' Yet, the following day, a more thorough inspection turned up myriad problems, according to Moose's affidavit. 'On May 22, members of my staff, including our chief of security and our contract building engineer, spent the day surveying and documenting the condition of the building, to include photographs,' he stated. 'They reported evidence of rats and roaches in the building,' which he said was a first. Moose says in his affidavit that staff reported 'other deficiencies in the maintenance of the building, including the failure to maintain vehicle barriers and the cooling tower, water leaks, damage to the garage door, and missing ceiling tiles in multiple places in the building (which I have been told suggest likely water damage).' 'In addition,' the affidavit contends, 'I learned from my team that sometime in the past several days, before we regained control of the property and assumed control for security, someone had scrawled graffiti on one of the outside spaces.' This occurred, according to the affidavit, because 'the building ha[d] been essentially abandoned for many weeks,' during which time DOGE left USIP HQ with 'only a few security guards on site, with no perimeter patrols.' According to Moose's affidavit, he 'immediately resumed' his duties at USIP, and reached out to staff and board members to begin working there again. It says USIP has once again assumed control of their building, has engaged a private security firm to guard the premises, and has taken over responsibility for the building's maintenance. At the same time, Musk is leaving DOGE as his 130-day tenure as a 'special government employee' comes to an end. Trump and DOGE have appealed Howell's ruling. Moose did not respond on Friday to The Independent 's requests for comment, nor did the attorneys representing him and USIP in court. Messages seeking comment from Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Carilli, DOGE's lawyer in the case, and the White House, also went unanswered.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
I graduated then went to work a Burger King shift - now I'm $138,000 richer
A Georgia teenager working at Burger King just hours after his graduation ceremony last week caught the eye of a woman sitting in the drive-through line. Maria Mendoza, was impressed at how cheery he was to simply be doing his job, even right after graduating from high school. On a whim, she recorded the teen, Mykale Baker, putting together an order and posted it to TikTok with the caption: 'This young man deserves a scholarship.' That video got more than 4 million views, with many commenters prodding Mendoza to start a GoFundMe so people could donate to his college education. On Tuesday, Mendoza posted a follow-up video of her visiting the 18-year-old at the Burger King in Dacula and surprising him with the fundraiser, which at that point had raised just over $6,000. Upon learning that hundreds of strangers had donated to help him pursue an education, Baker broke down crying before hugging his mother and Mendoza. As of late Saturday afternoon, more than $138,000 has been raised for Baker. Now, thousands of well-meaning strangers have donated to make sure the youngster has a great future ahead of him. 'I just want to say thank you to my parents and all the people that see the good in me and believe in me, and donated all that money to me,' Baker said in an interview with 11Alive. Mendoza told the outlet that she was moved by Baker's work ethic and was inspired to repay him for being such a stand-up person. 'While many graduates spent the night celebrating with friends and family, one young man quietly showed the world what determination looks like,' Mendoza wrote on the GoFundMe description. 'Just after receiving his diploma - still proudly wearing his medals - he reported to his shift at Burger King. He didn't do it for attention. He doesn't even know his story went viral. But thousands of people were moved by his dedication, humility, and work ethic, she wrote. Mendoza later found out that he wasn't even scheduled to work that night, but volunteered to help out his coworkers because there was a huge rush after graduation. So, just hours after he walked the stage at Mills Creek High School, he was right back at Burger King to pitch in. 'He was so kind, so polite,' Mendoza told 11Alive. 'Radiating joy, even after such a big day. His dedication and quiet strength really moved me. I felt called to do something to recognize that.' 'I'm just grateful I got to do something for him,' she added. 'He inspired me.'
