- Elon Musk shared a video Monday of the inside of the prototype for the rocket SpaceX wants to use to send people to Mars.
- SpaceX unveiled the Starship Mark 1 prototype over the weekend. The new video shows inside the rocket's cargo hold.
- Musk said: "Production version will be a lot more polished than this prototype, but still fun to see."
- The final Starship rocket will be much taller, and Musk said it "will allow us to inhabit other worlds."
- SpaceX wants to use it to colonize Mars, and is designing the rocket to make multiple trips to space a day.
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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shared a video of the inside of the prototype of its Starship rocket - the vessel he wants to use to bring people to the moon, and eventually to Mars.
SpaceX revealed the stainless-steel prototype of the Starship, the Starship Mk 1, over the weekend. Musk said: "Starship will allow us to inhabit other worlds."
The 164-foot-tall prototype is intended as a test vehicle that SpaceX will use to experiment with the technologies it hopes will one day bring a spaceship, and people, to Mars.
On Monday, Musk shared a video from inside the prototype's cargo bay. The video looks up through the ship, while the metallic echo in the audio gives a sense of just how big the space is.
"Production version will be a lot more polished than this prototype, but still fun to see," Musk wrote.
He said that tanks were located in the in tip of the ship's nose to balance the weight of the engine in the rear.
Musk presented SpaceX's full plan for the final Starship rocketson Saturday, where he said of the Mk 1 prototype: "I think this is the most inspiring thing I've ever seen."
He said that the prototype will soon fly to 65,000ft before coming back and landing. "It's really going be pretty epic to see that thing take off and come back," he said.
The final Starship rockets are meant to be significantly taller than the prototype, at around 40 stories tall. The ship is intended to be reuseable.
Musk said that the rocket could be used to bring people into orbit within a year.
This video shows how SpaceX plans for it to work:
Musk said that a fleet of Starship rockets would be central to keeping humans both alive and inspired.
"There are many troubles in the world, of course, and these are important, and we need to solve them. But we also need things that make us excited to be alive," he said.
"Becoming a space-faring civilization - being out there among the stars - this is one of the things that I know makes me be glad to be alive."
Musk also said on Twitter on Monday that learning how to survive on Mars would also help humans on earth.
"In solving for a good Mars climate, we will learn a great deal about how to do so on Earth. It is the inverse problem," he said.
Inside Starship cargo bay. Header tanks mounted in tip of nosecone to offset engine weight at rear. pic.twitter.com/EJSwqMCooA
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 1, 2019
Starship will be the most powerful rocket in history, capable of carrying humans to the Moon, Mars, and beyond pic.twitter.com/LloN8AQdei
- SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 29, 2019