SpaceX Big Falcon Rocket: How big Elon Musk’s Mars ship will be

An illustration of
SpaceX’s Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR, launching through Earth’s
clouds and toward space.

SpaceX

• Elon Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX, is building a gigantic
  rocketship to reach Mars.
• The Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR,
  will use a fully reusable booster and a fully reusable
  spaceship.
• In SpaceX’s “final’ design, the two-part launch system
  stands about 387 feet tall and 30 feet in diameter.
• We created a interactive size comparison
  tool to show how big a real-life BFR might be.

Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, is working on something big —
really big.

The
Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR, is an unprecedented launch system
designed to rocket up to 100 people and 150 tons of food, water,
and other supplies to the surface of Mars. The end goal:
colonize the red planet and back
up the human race.

Musk revealed what he described as the
final BFR design in September. It’s made of two giant stages:
a fully reusable rocket booster on the bottom, and a fully
reusable spaceship on top. The first crewed mission is
penciled in for 2023 and is expected to blast a Japanese
billionaire and a group of artists
around the moon.

The illustration below shows the approximate length and shape of
each part of the BFR system.

Olivia Reaney/Business Insider

The BFR’s dimensions and presumed capabilities are impressive —
so much so that quite a few people in the aerospace industry are

puzzled by how it will be done. They also wonder if it can be
built successfully by a private company on a budget of about
$2-10 billion. That’s Musk’s latest estimate for how much the
development of BFR will cost; the sum is actually a relative
pittance compared to what NASA is paying for its new (and not
reusable)
Space Launch System.

To help understand the magnitude of what Musk and his thousands
of employees at SpaceX are trying to accomplish, Business Insider
created an interactive size-comparison graphic.

Next to the rendering of BFR shown below, you’ll see a series of
familiar objects at the rocket’s base. (Some are so small that
you may have to scroll down a bit.) Toggle through the 20
comparisons by clicking “next” or “back” to get a sense of hte
rocket’s scale.