A NASA safety panel says filling a Starship for the Moon could take around 22 flights. Elon Musk says 6 to 8. That is not a rounding error — it is two different futures for what deep-space flight costs. The most important number in the Mars business this week was not a valuation or a launch date. It was a count of gas-station runs. On Thursday, October 22, NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel held its quarterly public meeting, and panel member Charlie Precourt — a former NA

On an earnings call, not a launch pad, SpaceX confirmed next month it will try to catch both halves of Starship — and told investors how often it plans to fly once it can. On October 10 this was still a hope: Flight 15, maybe four to six weeks out, maybe a ship catch. On Tuesday, October 20, it became a commitment made in front of investors. Opening SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call, Elon Musk put it plainly: "For Flight 15, which we expect to happen next month, we're goin

Ten years after Elon Musk unveiled his Mars ship, Starship finally reached orbit — and still watched the 2026 Mars window close. The lesson is not about rockets. It is about building a business on a calendar you do not control. On September 28, 2016, Musk unveiled the Interplanetary Transport System, a giant spaceship meant to carry people to Mars. On September 28, 2026 — ten years and a day later — its stainless-steel descendant, Starship, reached orbit for the first time on

Mars is not far away on a calendar. It is far away on a schedule — and the schedule only opens about once every 26 months. This month, you can watch it open. Every Mars mission you have ever heard of left Earth inside a narrow band of weeks. Not because launch providers like deadlines, but because the solar system imposes one. Earth circles the Sun in about 365 days; Mars takes about 687. The faster planet keeps lapping the slower one, and the two only line up in the geometry

The FAA just opened a review of a Starship cadence more than eighteen times today's limit — and cadence, not any single rocket, is what makes Mars affordable. Read the number twice, because it changes the business. SpaceX is proposing up to 456 Starship launches and 912 landings a year from Starbase at Boca Chica, Texas. The Federal Aviation Administration said this week it will prepare a programmatic environmental impact statement for the proposal, opening a scoping period w

A student-built gel experiment rode a cargo flight this morning — aimed at one of the hardest gates on the road to Mars. The most important Mars launch of the week was not a Mars launch. At 6:33 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, October 13, a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on NASA's CRS-35 mission. The booster, flying for the eighth time, returned about eight minutes later to Landing Zone 40, with sonic booms rolling across th

No customer has ever bought a ticket to Mars. So who is writing the checks that are building the road there? Follow the capital stack. Every Mars headline is secretly a finance story. A rocket rises, and underneath it sit four different kinds of money, stacked in layers, each with its own motive. Understand the stack and you understand why Mars is moving now — after decades of paper studies — and who gets paid along the way. This is the pillar piece for The Money: the map we

The next Starship flight is the one where the economics of Mars change forever. Elon Musk has a habit of attaching dates to the future and letting the future negotiate. But what he said Saturday, in a virtual interview at the X Takeover fan event at Giga Texas, deserves to be taken seriously even by the skeptics: Starship Flight 15 is "hopefully" four to six weeks out, and the headline goal is to catch the upper-stage ship with the tower's arms — both stages recovered, both s