For a space program to be supported, not by three or four flight vehicles, but by scores of them—and eventually hundreds—is revolutionary. Starship ascents will be counted in rates of flights per week, or even per day. The Shuttle’s average flight rate of four per year, meant that, with a program annual cost of $4 billion per year, the actual cost of a Shuttle flight was a whopping $1 billion. A Starship transorbital railroad, employing 5,000 people, would cost about that much per year. Musk is aiming to manage 200 flights, which is possible with 20 operational Starships each turned around to fly again every 36 days. That would work out to $5 million per flight, 1/200th the cost of the Shuttle with five times its payload, for a thousandfold improvement overall. The benefits of Starship for both robotic and human exploration are hard to overstate. Mars’ recent arrival, Perseverance, can deliver one ton to the Red Planet’s surface. Starship, with its 100-ton capacity, can land a battalion of robots. These could include many Perseverance-like explorers, and much bigger versions of the Ingenuity helicopter. Smaller rovers armed with high-resolution cameras could map the area, transmit to Earth, and allow millions of citizen scientists to walk the landscape in virtual reality and point the machines toward anything interesting. Construction robots, too, possibly humanoid in form, could build a Mars base capable of converting Martian carbon dioxide and water ice into methane-and-oxygen rocket propellant to store in tanks. With such a set-up, fully supplied in advance, Starships could start sending humans.