THE 21ST CENTURY, PRODUCED AT SCALE: Inside Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week—and settle Mars.

Compare that to NASA and its Space Launch System, the big rocket that the space agency has been developing for a decade and for which Boeing only recently completed a single core stage. This core stage is about 15 meters taller than Starship but lacks its complexity. NASA will, in fact, toss each SLS core stage into the ocean after a single use. And Boeing doesn’t have to make the engines, as the rocket uses 40-year-old space shuttle main engines. Despite this, and with nearly $2 billion in annual funding from NASA, Boeing’s stretch goal for building core stages is one to two per year… some time in the mid-2020s.

SpaceX’s stretch goal is to build one to two Starships a week, this year, and to pare back construction costs to as low as $5 million each.

“That’s fucking insane,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s insane,” Musk replied.

“I mean, it really is.”

“Yeah, it’s nuts.”

“As I look across the aerospace landscape, nobody is doing anything remotely like this,” I said.

“No, it’s absolutely mad, I agree,” Musk said. “The conventional space paradigms do not apply to what we’re doing here. We’re trying to build a massive fleet to make Mars habitable, to make life multi-planetary. I think we need, probably, on the order of 1,000 ships, and each of those ships would have more payload than the Saturn V — and be reusable.”

“Faster, please,” seems a bit presumptuous here.