The destination
From IPO to a city on Mars
Reusable rockets pay for Starlink. Starlink pays for Starship. Starship is the vehicle for the actual goal, and the IPO is just the launchpad.
The transfer window
Earth and Mars line up for an efficient crossing only about every 26 months. Each window is a narrow door: miss it and the next one is more than two years away. Starship is designed to send cargo and, eventually, people through those doors at a cadence no vehicle ever has.
The hundred-year plan, in public
The stated ambition is a self-sustaining city on the order of a million people, able to survive even if the ships from Earth stop coming. That is a multi-decade, aspirational goal, not a dated milestone, and we treat it as such: a direction, visualized.
What makes it more than a slide is the funding chain. A public SpaceX with Starlink revenue and capital-markets access is, in this telling, how the Mars program gets paid for. Hence the framing of this whole project: IPO is not the destination. It's the launchpad.
The settlement simulator
Set the fleet, watch the math. A toy model with every assumption on screen: transfer windows every 26 months, production capped at 1,000 ships per window, and self-sustaining defined as a city of one million.
Self-sustaining by
2075
1,084,964
people on Mars
9,753
Starship flights flown
2031
first boots on Mars
Assumptions over forecasts: immigration plus natural growth, no attrition, and a clean production ramp. Drag the sliders and the URL updates, so any scenario is shareable.
Forward-looking and aspirational statements describe publicly stated goals, not commitments or schedules. ipo2mars is unofficial, not affiliated with SpaceX, and not investment advice.