" ***Can SpaceX Afford its New Mars Rocket — And will There be a Market for It?

Can SpaceX afford its new Mars rocket — and will there be a market for it?

SpaceX has been whispering about its Interplanetary Transport System for years. Now, it has finally unveiled a beautiful animation of what this system will look like and how it will take humans to Mars.

On Friday, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk laid out his vision for SpaceX’s future: the company is going all-in on a next-generation vehicle called the BFR, or Big Fucking Rocket. This rocket, which will be capable of going to the Moon and Mars, will eventually become SpaceX’s primary vehicle for launching satellites and traveling to the International Space Station, too.

It’s a radical move for the company, which has a fairly reliable rocket already. But can SpaceX afford this change? In his presentation, Musk discussed how SpaceX plans to fund the cost of developing the vehicle — though he didn’t mention any dollar figures — as well as what it will be used for when it’s complete. His ideas may be enough to fund the transition and keep the company profitable, but there are some fairly obvious gaps in the plan.

DEVELOPING THE ROCKET

Musk made one thing very clear: SpaceX’s future is the BFR. The company is no longer going to put resources into improving its current line of Falcon 9 vehicles or its bigger, next-generation Falcon Heavy. Instead, all of the company’s research and development resources will go into creating the new monster rocket. “He can now use those same now-proven people who have built flight hardware to now redesign the spacecraft,” Charles Miller, president of NexGen Space LLC, a space consulting firm, and a former member of the Trump administration’s NASA transition team, tells The Verge.