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)
Crustal thickness: Isidis 6 km minimum, global 42 to 56 km, Tharsis 117 km maximum.
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Isidis min | 6 km |
| Global lo | 42 km |
| Global hi | 56 km |
| Tharsis max | 117 km |
Polar ice volume (km³)
Polar ice volume: north polar layered deposits 780,000 cubic kilometers; south polar layered deposits 1,600,000 cubic kilometers.
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| North polar layered deposits | 780,000 km³ |
| South polar layered deposits | 1,600,000 km³ |
Surface power draw (MW)
Surface power draw: ISRU plant 3.38 megawatts, crew of 12 at 0.1 megawatts, 100-person ECLSS 2.25 megawatts.
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| ISRU plant | 3.38 MW |
| Crew of 12 | 0.1 MW |
| 100-person ECLSS | 2.25 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
- Starship vehicle and Mars architectureSpaceX
- Human spaceflight — MarsSpaceX
- Starship Flight 13SpaceX
- The Martian DichotomyDesk essay
- Powering Mars — the megawatt bottleneckDesk essay
- The 2026 Refueling GatekeeperDesk essay
- MarsForge Technical Lite BriefingForge note
- Why Mars, Not the MoonX dispatch
- TeraFab is the silicon backboneX dispatch
- Orbital Elixir — in-space refuelingMedium
- MarsForge community on XX community
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