Elon Musk: “We’ll Build Starships at the Scale Boeing and Airbus Build Planes”

Elon Musk: We'll be building as many Starships as Boeing and Airbus make commercial airplanes.

“We will be making, at some point, probably as many Starships for Mars as Boeing and Airbus make commercial airplanes. So this is really an enormous scale. And each Starship is bigger than a 747 or an A380. It's truly enormous.

And then in terms of Starlink satellites, we'll be making on the order of 5,000 a year, maybe at some point closer to 10,000 a year. And those Starlink v3 satellites are each the size of roughly a 737. They're pretty big. That compares to the B24 bomber in World War II.

Now it's still small compared to Tesla. It just puts things into perspective that it is actually possible to build a vast number of interplanetary Starships. And even when you can compare things on the tonnage standpoint, Tesla and other car companies are still building far more complex manufactured tonnage than SpaceX. Which is really a way of saying that it's very achievable.

These numbers, while they are insanely high by traditional space standards, are achievable by humans because they have been achieved in other industries.”

SpaceX Update, May 29, 2025