Sometime surprisingly soon (not soon), a thousand spaceships could colonize Mars.

Elon Musk wants to make sure any Mars journey is well stocked and as safe as possible.

This extremely unlikely plan involves making the most powerful spacecraft ever and the first that's fully reusable.

Elon Musk is bulking up his rocket-building workforce—big time. Ars Technica visited the Texas home of SpaceX, where Musk was calling a meeting on a Sunday “morning” at 1 a.m. There's a lot to unpack here.

To start, Musk is worried that our window of opportunity to make it to Mars is closing—so we better hurry up. After the 1 a.m. meeting, SpaceX added over 250 new employees in two days, representing a full doubling of the workforce.

Ars Technica visited the day after the major Starship prototype implosion that made news earlier this week. The SN1 prototype blew up as a direct result of weak welds. It sounds like everyone involved knew this prototype was faulty and told Musk so when he asked, and he insists it was never designed to fly for real anyway.

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Where’s Flextape when you need it!? — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 2, 2020

It’s worrying, though, because “SpaceX is designing its factory here to build a Starship every 72 hours,” Ars Technica reports. This means its facility in Texas has to include huge windbreaks—think of the enormous, sky-high protective nets at some driving ranges, but solid—in order to be able to safely stack Starships. “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,” Musk said.

Let’s break that down, because it’s bonkers.

Right now, there’s no reusable rocket, period, and there never has been. The Space Shuttle was the first reusable spacecraft , which is a different thing and an important distinction. The shuttle launched vertically like a rocket (as opposed to a horizontal airplane- or jet-type takeoff), but shed enormous disposable rocket boosters and fuel tanks as soon as it got into orbit.

Saturn V, the rocket that delivered people to the moon , was the most powerful rocket ever built at the time, designed to carry a lot—i.e., all of its boosters and fuel and the capacity for 90,000 pounds of payload. Some rockets can carry heavier payloads, but these have gone to low-earth orbit almost exclusively since countries stopped sending people to the moon. Musk is making a historic ask in more ways than one.

Musk's thinking might be, well, a moonshot, but his opinions and plans are pragmatic for the future he imagines for humanity.

If we want to live on more than one planet long term, Musk says, the settlements everywhere have to be stable and sustainable, even if the next supply ship is delayed or never materializes at all. And in that sense, stocking the planet with 1,000 ships means a depth and breadth of supplies that’s far beyond what most existing ideas can manage.

With 1,000 ships, you could have one (or five!) that only carry nutritious soil. You could have dozens that only carry liquefied, breathable air . Ninety million pounds is the amount of just fertilizer that Americans apply each year. It's so much to be able to carry into space, but it's very little by Earth terms.

“Success is not assured,” Musk told Ars Technica. It’s poetic to use a big understatement to describe what’s perhaps the most ambitious project people have spent real money and time developing in this way. But one of the secrets of Musk’s undisputed success is how much you end up rooting for his vision.

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