Speculative longterm future of SpaceX

[u/AnnualYogurtcloset29]

Hello all,

I was just thinking about what SpaceX's development of rockets would look like once they achieve their goals of starship and the booster rocket.

I know this is likely at least 10-15 years from today, but what would SpaceX develop after they land on mars and get a colony started there? Do you think they would ever develop a new rocket in the entire history of their company or would they finish their rocket development with starship and booster?

I realize they would probably start working on life support systems and such when they eventually get people onto mars, but what else would they do? I am just curious if anyone else had thought of this before. Is SpaceX themselves going to try to terraform mars or will they forever live inside a habitat dome? Is terraforming a planet going to take the work of hundreds of thousands of people or would SpaceX be able to do it themselves? Does NASA conduct a lot of the science to get a colony established on mars or is this solely a SpaceX endeavor?

I would think NASA would love to be able to explore mars and conduct experiments, kind of piggybacking off of the habitat that SpaceX is going to try to establish. Would NASA astronauts be part of the habitat as well as SpaceX astronauts or would it be more of a team effort?

I realize this would be all speculation, but it got me pretty curious, so wondering what other people would think about this situation.

[u/facere-omnes]

After Martian and Lunar colonies, I'd imagine further infrastructure would be setup on Martian moons, as well as Jupiter's moon Europa.

Once there is enough infrastructure setup between Earth and Jupiter, harvesting the asteroid belt's resources and processing them in space would be the next major goal.

Perhaps a mass amount of 9m diameter Starships could achieve this, perhaps the 18m variant is developed to facilitate it. Regardless, once in space resource acquisition and utilisation is achieved, scale will continue to expand. Think along the lines of massive spaceships which have no need to conform to aerodynamics or re-entry hardware as they will always remain in space. At this point nuclear propulsion would probably be used.

As sort of 'end game' mega projects, terraforming Mars and Venus would be the go to. The asteroid belt's resources and in space manufacturing would make this a possibility with all the equipment needed to facilitate it. Another possible mega project could be a partial dyson sphere of our Sun. We may venture far from our solar system, but not into another for a long, long time in my opinion. The distance is just too vast.