SpaceX Starship event: Elon Musk talks Mars missions and more in megarocket update

Quick recap of the major points from Musk's presser on Thursday:

• Musk reiterated the need for humanity to become multiplanetary.
• He spoke of a future where Starships could be built every three days. This would also allow 10 Starships to be launched, three times a day. Such a launch cadence, Musk said, would be critical to sustaining a human colony on Mars.
• The presentation recapped a lot of the key tech in Starship and the Super Heavy booster and provided a look at Raptor 2 engines.
• Musk unveiled a new hype video of Starship's potential to end the presentation. We've got the video just below.
• FAA environmental approval could come in March. No word on the orbital flight date but confident that Starship will reach orbit before the end of the year.
• Musk would shift energies to Kennedy in the case of FAA launching a full environmental assessment at Starbase. 

Musk is continuing to take questions during the livestream but things are winding down a little, so we're going to close off the blog. Thanks a ton for joining me tonight. Hope you were entertained.

We didn't get a lot of clarity around timelines but that's not all that unusual in spaceflight, as avid sky watchers known. Musk did go over a lot of big dreams of colonizing Mars -- and Starship certainly has potential to contribute to this -- but there's a lot of Martian water to go under the interplanetary bridge just yet.

We look forward to seeing what happens with Starship in 2022.

Our expert team at CNET Highlights over on YouTube has already cut the hype video for your viewing pleasure. It's a must watch.

One of the holdups for Starship taking to orbit right now is an environmental assessment. Musk is asked a question about when we might expect the orbital flight... but he kind of dodges the meat of the question.

"We don't have a ton of insight into where things stand with the FAA," Musk says.

"We have gotten sort of a rough indication that there may be an approval in March, but that's that's all we have." 

He adds later that he is confident the Starship will get to orbit by the end of this year.

Here it comes, a new hype video for the Starship's missions across the solar system. We'll have a video of the hype reel for you soon but jump into the livestream and take a look. 

Gotta be honest, it was pretty epic.

"Let's make this real," Musk says as the hype video comes to an end. "Let's make this real," he says again.

Musk says Starship will be performing Starlink missions and human spaceflight missions with NASA, but doesn't give a timeline on when those are expected to occur. He does mention the DearMoon mission, which is expected to do a loop around the moon in 2023. However, it's unclear if that timeline will be met -- there still seems to be a lot of work to do in less than 24 months.

He also hints at what's to come.

"There's going to be some future announcements that I think people will be pretty fired up about," says Musk.

Musk is talking about the ship's engines and the development of Raptor 2, which has 230 tons of thrust. He says SpaceX should be able to get that to 250. 

The second version is "greatly simplified," Musk says, and calls it much more robust. 

"It's only going to get better from there."

The Super Heavy booster will have more than twice the thrust of the largest rocket to ever get to orbit, NASA's Saturn V -- which helped put humans on the moon. Musk says Super Heavy will be the largest flying object of any kind (but it of course absolutely has to fly).

"It was 70 meters but then there was an extra half barrel section that the team deleted and totally accidentally it's 69 meters," Musk says, referring to the sex number or something. It's also booster four and ship 20 that stands behind him, apparently. 420. Another funny number.

The "Technoking meme lord" mentions the numbers follow him around to laughter from the audience.

Musk quickly details the Starship heat shield. 

"This is the world's largest heat shield," he says, noting it's made at a little factory in Florida known as "the bakery."

"We need to have a heat shield that is capable of resisting extreme heat but also is not crazy expensive." He says the team has achieved this.

"One day we could make Mars a planet like Earth," Musk says.

He is saying a lot of things that are theoretically possible, but words don't really help explain just how difficult some of these tasks will be. He's talking here about terraforming a different planet. That would require an immense amount of work. It all sounds brilliant and inspiring but it's decades away. I don't know that I'll even be alive to see it! 

But... Musk urges humanity to move fast.

"I will be frank. Civilization is feeling a little fragile these days," he says.

Musk is going through some extremely (extremely) ambitious goals for Starship right now without putting any kind of timeline on things. 

"Our goal is to be making at least one stack per month, and then ultimately, potentially, a ship every three days," he says. "There'll be more ships than our boosters because the booster actually, even though it's gigantic, will come back in about six minutes."

In the graph above, you can see how much mass you can take to space if 10 Starships are launching three times a day!

That's a truly insane amount of launches and this is really dreaming stuff but it's all in service of building a colony on Mars that Starship would be able to service. 

"If the ships from Earth stop coming for any reason, the city will die out."

CNET Highlights also has a great cut of the plans here:

Rapid reusability is the key to Starship and the way to achieve that, hopefully, is to use the chopstick arms we discussed earlier in the live blog. Starship is expected to take off and fly back to the launch tower so it can be quickly refurbished and reflown. 

"We obviously need to accomplish that. That's not done yet," Musk says before launching into a joke.

"If it does come in too fast and shear off the arms then I guess it will be ... a farewell to arms."

The crowd let out a murmured laugh.

Musk is rehashing some of the reasons for developing Starship that he's gone over in the past. The first?

"It is very important, essential, that over the long term that we become a multiplanet species and ultimately even go beyond the solar system, and bring life with us," he says.

The other reason is to inspire the human race, he notes. But he does bring up rebuttals -- the idea that we have too many problems to solve on Earth. 

"I completely agree that the vast majority of resources should be dedicated to solving problems on Earth," Musk says. "I'd say like more than 99% of our resources should be oriented towards solving problems on Earth."

Musk has taken the stage. 

"Before we jump into the details ... I think it's worth just talking a bit about this. Like, why are we doing this?"

He's straight into the big question: Why? 

"I think this is just an incredibly important thing for the future of life itself," he said.

I can't believe this but the presentation is starting only three minutes after the expected go time. I'm being sincere when I say "Thank you Elon" because I have a lunch I really want to get to.

Make sure to hit play on the livestream above and we'll post the major announcements here! Let's go.

If you've never watched an Elon Musk presentation before, here are a few things you need to know:

• It's unlikely to start on time. I don't recall any presentations ever starting on time. We're already late.
• I'd say, optimistically, 10 minutes late is a good approximation of how long you'll be waiting.
• Tonight's bingo card features "we have to make humans a multiplanetary species" -- Musk brings this out a lot in regards to Starship.
• It can be a bit droll and meandering sometimes. 
• The meme count is generally low, despite Musk's Twitter reputation.

We have lights, cameras... but no action yet! Thanks to SpaceX watcher @LabPadre, we do have a view from the ground. 

The full stack Starship is looking mighty fine.

Yesterday, Musk posted drone footage of the Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster at Starbase, with the former held up by the launch and catch tower -- robotic arms affectionately dubbed "chopsticks" by some SpaceX watchers. 

There haven't been any big updates on the launch and catch tower outside a few Musk tweets, so we could hear a little more about the extreme engineering behind the mecha-mitts this evening.

Just learning about Starship for the first time? Want to know a little more about SpaceX's plans for the first orbital flight? 

Look no further friends. CNET space gurus Claire Reilly and Eric Mack have you covered with a neat video explainer.

During the last Starship update, back in 2019, Musk was flanked by the glistening silver rocket. This time, he's going to be flanked by the mammoth, fully stacked version of Starship. It's a pretty impressive sight as you can see from his tweet earlier today. I expect it will be even more impressive when the lights are off.