The Atlantic

SpaceX Has Starry-Eyed Ambitions for Its Starship

Elon Musk has laid out an ambitious future for his spaceship project, the effort to deliver people to the moon and Mars.
Source: Callaghan O'Hare / Reuters

The whole thing felt like an Apple event.

The weeks of anticipation and breathless guesses from fans and critics. Onstage, the greatest-hits reel highlighting the company’s beloved products over the years. A grand walk-through of the next product’s features: the sleek design, the impressive specs, simulations of how it’s going to work. A man with a mic, both salesman and visionary, looking out at the crowd.

It is strange to compare the unveiling of a spaceship to the annual release of a smartphone, but this is the reality Elon Musk has conjured with SpaceX, and in a relatively short amount of time.

Musk gave a talk about SpaceX’s prototype spaceship, Starship, on Saturday night in Boca Chica, Texas, a small coastal town not far from the U.S.-Mexico border, which

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