Working numbers

Dossier

The stack that has to close before anyone comes home — crust, ice, watts, propellant, cadence — drawn from @LaceyPresley, MarsForge, and the Starship architecture SpaceX has published. These are not vibes. They are loads.

Crustal gap

32 km

thickness delta

Northern lowlands versus southern highlands. The scar that decided where the last oases could live.

Exchangeable ice

20–30 m

global equivalent

Polar layered deposits plus mid-to-high latitude ground ice. Loss rates are geological. Extraction is the problem.

Surface load

3.6 MW

continuous

Life support plus Sabatier, electrolysis, cryocapture, soil bake, and liquefaction for a two-ship return.

Return propellant

2,400 MT

LOX / LCH4

1,200 metric tons per Starship. You do not ship this from Earth. The plant has to exist before the crew leaves.

39A cadence

24 / yr

tanker launches

Close succession is the only defense against cryogenic boil-off starving the orbital depot.

Crustal thickness (km)

Polar ice volume (km³)

Surface power draw (MW)

Vehicle

Starship / Super Heavy

SpaceX published figures · August 2026

Stack height: 124 m
Diameter: 9 m
Payload, reusable: 100+ t
Super Heavy: 33 × Raptor 3
Booster thrust: 8,240 tf
Booster propellant: 3,650 t
Ship engines: 3 + 3 RVac
Ship thrust: 1,614 tf
Ship propellant: 1,600 t
Raptor: 250 tf · CH4/LOX
Catch: Tower, pad return
Transfer window: ~26 mo

Silicon

TeraFab loop

Chip split: 80% D3 / 20% AI5
D3 duty: Radiation-hard orbital servers
AI5/AI6 duty: 50× edge efficiency for Optimus
100 GW / yr: 1,000,000 t hardware to orbit
Wafer starts: 1M / month at Grimes County
Rule: Land the booster or there is no server

Flight 13 · live stack

Starbase, July 24, 2026

July 24, 2026 · 5:51 p.m. CT · Starbase. Starship / Super Heavy V3 · second V3 flight. Not a brochure — the last published flight test this desk is built on.

01All 33 Raptor 3 engines lit on Super Heavy.
02Hot-staging. Ship lit six Raptors and flew the planned ascent.
03Booster: first V3 33-engine boostback; landing relight failed; hard splashdown in the Gulf.
04Ship deployed all 20 Starlink V3 birds. RF and laser links. Telemetry down.
05In-space Raptor relight. Heatshield data on entry. Four-flap guidance to the Indian Ocean.
06Three-engine landing flip and burn. Soft splashdown. Intact heatshield seen for the first time.

Architecture

How the published plan reaches Mars

SpaceX published figures, August 2026. The loads on this page — ice, watts, 2,400 tons of return propellant — are what that architecture still has to close on the surface. Full mission architecture.

Transfer window
~26 mo
Each synodic window is the only cheap path. Miss it and the stack waits.
On-orbit refill
Tankers
A windowless Starship tops off the Mars ship in LEO. Several hundred tonnes of cargo can then go all the way.
Propellant on Mars
CH4 / LOX
Raptor already drinks methane and oxygen that can be mined and refined on the surface. That is the return ticket.
Entry
7.5 km/s
Aerodynamic deceleration, a heatshield that has to survive more than one pass, then flaps to a landing.
Cargo rate
NE 2028
Published cargo flights to the Martian surface for research and development start no earlier than 2028, at $100 million per metric ton.
Cadence in a window
>10 / day
The city does not get built on a handful of ships. The published plan is more than ten launches a day when the window is open.
Starbase build
1,000 / yr
The plant is sized to build up to a thousand Starships a year so a window can carry a civilization, not a flag.
City scale
~1M people
A self-sufficient city: millions of tonnes of cargo, power, mining, propellant, construction, comms, and a way home.

The planet

Mars, as flown to

Diameter: 6,791 km
Sol: 24 h 40 min
Gravity: 38% of Earth
Mean distance: 225 Mkm
Age: 4.5 Gyr

Primary sources

From the public record

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