SpaceX’s Starship: The Billion-Dollar Gamble to Beat Humanity to Mars

Elon Musk’s orbital tin can just got a deadline.

Subheader: Mars or Bust—With a Side of Investor Skepticism

SpaceX is throwing hardware at the problem—again—with its fifth Starship prototype now undergoing round-the-clock testing. The goal? A crewed Mars mission before NASA or China can even draft their PowerPoint slides. Meanwhile, Wall Street quietly recalculates how much longer Tesla stock can subsidize interplanetary pipe dreams.

Subheader: Rapid Unscheduled Disassemblies Welcome

Three explosive test flights in 2024 didn’t faze the team. ’Failure is an option here,’ said one engineer, channeling Musk’s mantra. The new Raptor engines promise enough thrust to escape Earth’s gravity—and possibly shareholders’ gravity too.

Closer: When your R&D budget could fund a small country’s space program, ’moonshot’ starts sounding like a stock market warning.

Starship has been struggling with recent failures

This year, Starship experienced two back-to-back test failures. Both flights ended in explosions, sending debris toward the Atlantic and Caribbean, forcing temporary airline detours. 

SpaceX plans another test on Tuesday evening. In a statement on Friday, it said engineers had “conducted extensive testing” to understand the last failure and had made changes for the next attempt, adding that progress with Starship “won’t always come in leaps.”

“It’s definitely been a rough start of the year for Starship,” Shana Diez, one of SpaceX’s engineering vice presidents, wrote on X after the second explosion. 

It’s definitely been a rough start of the year for Starship. Really causes me to reflect on how many tens of thousands (or more) things have to go right in a rocket launch to result in success and how even one thing being slightly out of place or out of order results in total…

— Shana Diez (@ShanaDiez) March 18, 2025

A single fault can doom a launch, she said, and when the cost and time of each attempt are added up, “the overall problem can feel quite daunting.”

Some employees were recently moved to a project known inside the company as Starfall. That effort links Starship to a U.S. military plan to MOVE heavy cargo around the planet in less than an hour. Generals and industry planners have long studied whether rockets could rush supplies to distant bases faster than any plane or ship. 

SpaceX said in a court filing last year that it hopes to fly a demonstration for the Air Force during which Starship WOULD land more than 66,000 pounds of government freight and receive about $149 million to keep developing the concept.

The idea is demonstrated in an animation SpaceX released in 2017. That video showed passengers boarding a Starship in New York City and landing in Shanghai 39 minutes later. Executives have rarely discussed point-to-point service since, but the cargo version remains alive under the Starfall banner.

Landing SpaceX rockets on Mars remains Musk’s main goal

Musk has been pushing the company to launch a spacecraft for a mission to Mars as soon as next year. Reaching that date means beating several engineering hurdles, including the need to fill Starship’s tanks while it is already in orbit. Unlike most rockets, which get loaded with fuel while on Earth, SpaceX will have to find a way to fuel up Starships while they are in orbit. 

Moving thousands of tons of fuel into space has never been attempted. The fluids must stay at extremely low temperatures or they boil off, and engineers must safeguard valves, pumps, and seals designed to work in zero gravity. 

In a recent WHITE House budget outline, the administration aligned its priorities with NASA and proposed adding $1 billion for Mars-focused missions while trimming many other projects. At this point, it looks like both the government and SpaceX have aligned goals.

Starship departs for Mars at the end of next year, carrying Optimus.

If those landings go well, then human landings may start as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely. https://t.co/JRBB95sgNN

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 15, 2025

Musk founded SpaceX more than twenty years ago with the stated goal of making humankind a multiplanet species. He also leads Tesla and other firms, and in March, he posted on X that he hopes to load Tesla’s humanoid robot onto a Starship heading to Mars in 2026. “Starship departs for Mars at the end of next year, carrying Optimus,” he wrote.

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