In one of his recent posts on X (formerly called a tweet), SpaceX Chief Engineer and CEO Elon Musk made an extraordinary announcement. He upped the Starship production goal from 1,000 ships per year to around 10,000.
Last year, during Elon Musk’s presentation, “The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary,” he set the initial goal of making around 1,000 Starships per annum. He delivered this presentation at the newly developed City of Starbase, Texas (video below).
To achieve the monumental goal of producing around 10,000 Starships a year, SpaceX teams at Starbase need to reach a production cadence that’s never been achieved before. Starship’s latest Block 3 (V3) prototypes are 69.8 meters tall, significantly larger than its previous Block 2 (V2) generation.
SpaceX is building this massive 700,000 square-foot Starship hanger called Gigabay at Starbase. This manufacturing facility, along with the Starfactory, is going to produce a large number of Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rockets.
It’s Musk’s dream to make life multiplanetary. The first stop in this mission is to make Mars habitable for humans, and it requires millions of humans and large quantities of cargo to create a city on Mars. This will only be possible if humans can send thousands of Starships with heavy payloads to Mars as soon as the window opens every 26 months.
Musk’s space exploration and astronautics company is also building a Gigabay Starship hanger at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This will enable SpaceX to launch Starships from multiple sites simultaneously in the future.
Gigabay Starbase Construction Update
We can see in the Starbase picture above and video below that SpaceX is continually making progress on the construction of the Starship Gigabay at Starbase.
Until the first week of January 2026, SpaceX raised a massive steel structure that will provide the structural support for the Gigabay Starship hanger. Currently, it looks like a jungle of steel pillars and large frames.
To understand how massive those steel structures are, you need to see the vehicle in the picture above and humans in the following video for scale. Producing megastructures like Starships, these ultra-massive buildings are a prerequisite.
According to Elon Musk, by some measures, Gigabay is going to be the biggest structure in the world. “That is a truly enormous structure,” he said (presentation above).
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Related SpaceX Starship News
- Starship Flight 12: Booster 19’s 10-engine static fire ends abruptly, SpaceX prepares for a 33-engine static fire test
- Starship Flight 12: V3 Booster 19 shows better propellant load speeds, static fire next with only 10 Raptor 3 engines
- Starship Flight 12: SpaceX to test Raptor 3 engines on the V3 Booster 19 for the first time
- Flight 12 Starship V3 (Ship 39) survives three cryo tests (videos)
- SpaceX prepares for Flight 12 Starship prelaunch testing, the first V3 Starship 39 (Starbase updates)
- Starship Booster 19 survives the cryo test, Flight 12 updates from Starbase
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