Elon Musk unveils new SpaceX spacecraft designed to carry crew to Mars

Billionaire promises to get new Starship into orbit within six months

Elon Musk has unveiled a spacecraft which he claimed would soon be ready to carry humans to Mars.

The controversial billionaire made the announcement during an event at his company SpaceX in Texas.

The Starship is designed to be re-useable, take off and land vertically and the company hope to have prototypes of the enormous vehicle into orbit within six months.

“This is going to sound totally nuts, but I think we want to try to reach orbit in less than six months,” Mr Musk said, standing in front of the metallic silver spaceship.

Within a few months, Starship will start practising taking off and landing, he added.

“We need to make space travel like air travel,” he said. “Any other mode of transport is reusable so the critical breakthrough is a rapidly reusable orbital rocket – this is the holy grail of space.”

His dream was to make human colonisation of the Moon, Mars and even further afield in the Solar System possible.

“I think we should really do our best to become a multi-planet species, and we should do it now.”

Standing at about 50m tall, the Starship will be able to lift a payload of up to 150 tons. It will be carried into space by a larger rocket called Super Heavy.

Although many of the details of the project had already been revealed to the public, Mr Musk said he had held the event to mark 11 years since SpaceX’s first rocket made it into orbit in 2008.

“If that launch had not succeeded that would have been the end of SpaceX,” Musk said.

It did succeed, making the company the first anywhere on Earth to get a privately-built liquid-fuelled rocket into space.

Despite that success and Mr Musk’s grandiose hopes for building cities across the Solar System, SpaceX’s main business remains building spacecraft for NASA to carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

Since the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011, NASA has only been able to get its astronauts into low-earth orbit by using Russia’s Soyuz system, but is working with private US firms including SpaceX to create alternatives, known as the Commercial Crew project.

However, tensions bubbled to the surface on Friday, when the head of NASA Jim Bridenstine effectively accused SpaceX of being distracted by its ambitious Starship programme.

“I am looking forward to the SpaceX announcement tomorrow,” he said. “In the meantime, Commercial Crew is years behind schedule. NASA expects to see the same level of enthusiasm focused on the investments of the American taxpayer. It’s time to deliver.”

Mr Musk responded by insisting only five per cent of his firm was working on the Starship.