And this is the very beginning, the first physical representation of the entire future of the company.

This is the rocket that Space six staking its future on the core reason that Space X is doing this is because of a dream that Elon Musk shared back in the early two thousands at the founding of Space Six.

He wanted to send a little plant to Mars and have it grow there to inspire people about space travel.

He thinks we need to back up the human race to Mars started Colony.

There, you know, on Earth to in this starship is key to all of that.

He wants to use it to transport 100 people and 150 tons of cargo to the Red Planet at a time, and he thinks by 2050 we could build a sustainable colony on Mars.

So Space six is testing the concepts and the engines behind this starship in South Texas, and they're starting Thio get this little tiny version of it called the Star Hopper, hopping off the ground to prove that the engines and the whole concept works.

Basically, the ideas will this thing blow up or not?

And so far it hasn't blown up.

Or we were down there for the very first hop of this vehicle, and it was the one of the loudest things I've ever heard.

But it did not blow up.

And since then, Space six has done another hop, and they're gonna take these hops of this vehicle higher and higher to about three miles up.

The engines that space six is using are brand new.

They're called Rapture engines.

These things are enormous.

They're about the size of a small delivery truck in which a controlled bomb goes off.

Basically, after these hot tests are done and Space six proves that the system won't explode on a whim, they're gonna put these rapture engines on an even bigger vehicle, which must have called the orbital version.

And that's going to go into orbit around Earth.

And the key thing with that test is not on Lee showing that it can get into orbit, but that it could come back when the spacecraft comes back to Earth.

It z entering the atmosphere of some point at 25 times the speed of sound that plows through the atmosphere builds up all this gas into a superheated levels that can vaporize steel.

So space looks need to prove that this vehicle will not destroy itself when it comes back to Earth, because if it does, then they can't safely launch people on it.

That's what you need a shield for.

You need to protect the vehicle from burning itself up when it either comes back to earth or is entering the very thin atmosphere of Mars.

There are a few critiques of steel, and one of them is that it's just so heavy it's dense.

If you try to use too much of it, your spacecraft gets bogged down and you can't launch as much payload into space.

So you have to be really creative about how you build your spacecraft.

Space X is getting around this problem by trying to go after a fuel tank structure, the internal structure, these little ribs and slacks and things to support the larger structure so that it doesn't fall in on itself.

That way, they could make the metal really thin, but also take advantage of this cheapness and also strength things.

Vehicle isn't using what Space six is typically used for.

Its Falcon nine and Falcon heavy rockets.

That's RP one.

It's a form of kerosene.

It's similar to the stuff that goes into jets.

It smells like jet fuel.

They also use liquid oxygen.

The new starship and specifically the star Hopper, which just launched, is using liquid methane and liquid oxygen.

Methane is important because Space six wants to be able to manufacture its fuel on another planet and specifically Mars.

And they can do that in theory, with the thin atmosphere that Mars has, they could take the carbon dioxide.

They could take water out of the ground, and they could take sunlight and use energy to combine those two and form methane on the surface of Mars, refuel starship and go back home to Earth.

The first things that Space X hopes to do with a full scale, fully operational starship is just show that it works.

They want to get this thing in the orbit, and then following that, they want to start sending the first missions to Mars.

These would be robots equipment to help scout out the surface and also set up a plant to generate methane in oxygen to fuel future mission to come back to Earth.

The first crewed mission, though, is going to be with a Japanese artist and fashion billionaire called Yasuko Miyazawa.

He's going to load up one of these starships with a crew full of artists and maybe a couple astronauts just for safety and go around the moon to show that the system works.

He's willing to put his life on the line for that, and Musk has even tease that he might go himself.

Right now, Space six is targeting 2023 or thereabouts tow.

Launch this crude moon mission.

But by 2024 the company wants to take advantage of a planetary alignment, which happens once every two years with Mars on Earth to sort of close the gap between the planets and launch the first crewed mission to Mars, land there and put boots on the ground.

There's another really important use for this vehicle.

They're going to try to launch 12,000 satellites.

That is twice as many as they're currently in space right now, and I think three or four times as many as there currently operational to build up a global network of satellite, high speed, low latency Internet so many times faster than you could get today from A from a commercial provider.

But to do that, they're going to need to launch a ton of these starling satellites at once in Starship could be the vehicle because it's so big and fully reusable to do that at low cost for Space six, we can't think of Starship just as a rocket tow.

Launch people to Mars.

It is going to be the future rocket for Space six and possibly the world.

It will launch the next generation of satellite Internet.

It could launch people to Mars.

Of course, it could also launch next generation telescopes.

And it could also launch NASA astronauts to the moon as well as landing craft in any number of things that people want to get up that are big and they want to do it cheaply.

If Space six can get government support, perhaps from NASA or the Department of Defense to develop starship, it's gonna go a long way into helping spaces get to the point where this system becomes a reality because Right now, they're relying on a Japanese billionaire and some of their own venture capital funding to fund this entire development project, which they estimate to be between two and $10 billion to complete.

Some critics say, however, that $10 billion is even a low limit.

It may cost as much as $20 billion to develop the system, so Space six can get outside support.

It can get government funding.

It's gonna help make this thing a reality.