What Life Inside The SpaceX Starship Will Be Like!

This is the SpaceX Starship. It's big, it's powerful, and it's the first rocket ever built that has a genuine shot at sending people from Earth to the planet Mars. But even for all its impressive size and capability, the Starship is far from a luxury cruise liner to the stars. The journey will be long, dangerous, uncomfortable, and kinda gross. The experience will push our interplanetary travelers to the limit. So if the Starship is going to carry people to Mars, then what is that actually going to look like? The initial promise of the Starship was that the entire upper half of this 50-meter-tall rocket would be wide open for both crew and cargo. About 1,000 cubic meters of sweeping, open-concept deck and humongous windows, all very luxurious. Then SpaceX started test-flying Starship prototypes and trying to land them, which did not start off very well. There was a long period of trial and error and crashing and exploding. One of the biggest changes made to Starship during this era was the relocation of the secondary fuel tanks for the landing burn. They moved up from the bottom of the rocket and into the nosecone. If you look at that flip maneuver that the ship performs as it comes in for a landing, the bottom of the rocket swings around like a pendulum. You don't want your fuel down there, you want it up in the top, where the ship remains relatively stable. The change worked great, but it does mean that the entire pointy bit is now off-limits for the crew, so no more big window. Then SpaceX started flying the Starship all the way to space and coming back down again, which led to another big change in design. They had to make the rocket bigger. In 2025, SpaceX began flying the Starship V2. This is a little tricky because while it's bigger on the outside by about 2 meters, the new Starship is actually smaller on the inside with about the same amount of height removed from the payload bay. What they did was actually extend the fuel tanks upward into the cargo area. This gives the Starship more propellant to work with, which is going to allow the ship to actually carry itself and a payload of 100 metric tons all the way to Earth orbit. So if we were traveling to Mars inside the Starship as we know it today, we'd have about 500 cubic meters of livable space. Now that's half of the original concept, but it's not small either. The International Space Station offers about 900 cubic meters of internal volume spread out over a claustrophobic maze of narrow passageways. And the station is permanently inhabited by a crew of seven people. It's even held up to 13 at one time. So how many people could we reasonably fit into a Starship V2 for the round trip to Mars and back again? Well, lucky for us, NASA went ahead and commissioned a study on this very topic back in the year 2013. They found that for a crewed mission to Mars with an estimated duration of 2.5 years, each person would need a minimum of 25 cubic meters. That is not personal space. That's just 25 cubic meters of general space per person, about the same volume as a shipping container. So according to that research, our Starship V2 could support up to 20 people maximum without significant risk of anyone going insane. But we also need to consider that crew space is not the same as cargo space. A Starship built for people is going to require floors, walls, and a center column with a ladder to move up and down. Then the entire lower level of our Starship habitat is going to be dedicated to an airlock and cargo bay because at some point, hopefully, we will land on Mars and head down to the surface. So with all of that considered, our 500 cubic meters is quickly shrinking into a claustrophobic nightmare. Now you might be able to make it work with a crew of six, but that's not how we're going to colonize Mars. And this is where Starship V3 comes in, the long Starship, taking it up to 69 meters tall. Starship V3 adds about 17 meters in length over V2, but that's also going to add a lot of weight. So the bigger rocket will need bigger fuel tanks, meaning we don't actually get all of that extra length back for habitable space. But what we do end up with is probably something a lot closer to that original Starship concept with about 1000 cubic meters of internal volume. So SpaceX still got us there. It just required a bit of compromise along the way. See, we can be realistic and optimistic at the same time. It is possible. Now that we finally know where we're living on our Mars trip, let's start building out our interior. Starting from the bottom, we know that there needs to be a cargo bay and airlock down there, and we can actually get a pretty good idea of what this is going to look like by referencing the design that SpaceX has already developed for the Artemis moon landing, which will use a modified Starship, probably based on the V2. The lower level is going to have a circular airlock that astronauts will enter from above. Inside that circle is where the EVA suits are kept. Once suited up, we can move into the unpressurized cargo hold. This is where exploration equipment is going to be stored. Mobility devices, scientific instruments, cameras, tools for collecting samples, all of that fun stuff. There's also the elevator. It's going to be a very long way down to the surface, so we've also had a quick glimpse at what SpaceX has in mind for the crew lift. It's kind of halfway between an old service elevator and a shark cage. Nothing fancy, which is good because we don't want this thing to break. Okay, so that's level one. Let's move up into level two. This would make the most sense as our first pressurized storage space, remembering that this ship needs to land on Mars, so we want to keep the center of gravity as low as possible, meaning heavy stuff on the bottom. So that's why our water system, our oxygen, and HVAC, our food, and our waste storage all goes on level two. Moving up again to deck three, it would make the most sense to keep the hygiene, washing, and toilet as close to the storage deck as possible. That keeps our plumbing to a minimum. This is not going to be luxurious. Do not expect a hot shower on our trip to Mars. At best, you'll wash yourself with a rag on a stick and shampoo your hair with a dry powder. But things get really brutal when we talk about waste water management. Here's the deal. Without recycling water, we would need to bring 27 metric tons of water for 10 people on a 900-day journey. That's somewhere between one quarter and one eighth of the Starship's total lifting capacity just to carry water. But if we recycle, we can get away with bringing just about three metric tons of water. For comparison, the standard on the ISS is that 93% of the water that's used is recycled. That means urine is filtered and recombined into the water supply. It also means that the number two is going to be dehydrated and split into solid waste, which gets stored down below. And the moisture released is also going to be recombined back into the water supply. Astronauts drink their own pee. This is what we signed up for. According to people who have seen the inside of the Starship Lunar Lander mock-up, SpaceX is developing these rectangular hygiene pods that would serve as a combination toilet and shower station, and they'd be positioned at an angle around the circular edge of the ship's interior to make the best use possible of the available space. That should leave enough space open to put our gym on the same level. Might as well keep all of the unpleasant odors contained on one floor. Everyone needs two hours of exercise per day, and that has to be split between cardio and strength training. So stationary bikes and treadmills with tie downs for zero gravity are standard issue as well as a special machine for full body resistance training. Moving up one level to deck four, and we'd be in the crew cabin space. Now, this kind of depends on how many people we are bringing with us. If we started off with 1,000 cubic meters of empty space, then installed the walls and floors, then filled up two whole decks with airlock and storage space, we're probably left with something in the neighborhood of 600 cubic meters of crew space. Now, it's not that easy to imagine just how much space we're actually talking about here. Most of us don't visualize things in cubic meters, so just know that the crew compartment of the Starship is going to be equivalent to a relatively large home with three or four bedrooms and around 2,300 square feet of floor space. Definitely not small and perfectly comfortable for the average family, right? But according to our NASA equation, for the maximum number of people we could fit in that space without anyone going insane, NASA would actually allow up to 24 people to live in one house. And that lines up with what we've learned about the Starship Moon Lander. Again, according to people in the know, SpaceX is also developing a rectangular bunk station in the same kind of box as the toilet pod. And according to renderings, SpaceX can fit 20 beds on one Starship deck. So that's probably our best indication for how many people are realistically coming along on our Mars trip. We are a crew of 20. It's probably worth mentioning that Elon Musk has confidently said in the past that Starship can carry 100 people to Mars in one trip. And while technically that is true, here's what that would look like. Keeping in mind you'd be stuck there for eight months at a time, I'm pretty sure this falls under the category of cruel and unusual punishment. Moving up again, and we're already at deck number five, and we can start getting into some comfort features. The mess hall or kitchen space, not that there'd be much cooking going on, preparing a meal in space basically consists of pumping hot water into a vacuum-sealed bag of dehydrated food. It's not all bad, though. Astronauts on the ISS still get pizza. It's more than likely that SpaceX would incorporate some kind of hydroponic greenhouse into the mess hall. NASA is already beginning some experiments with growing plants in zero gravity, and it should be possible. I wouldn't expect vine-ripe tomatoes, but we might have a bowl of fresh lettuce every now and then. Level six is where we can start opening things up a little more. We've got nine meters of width in this rocket, minus a little bit for the walls and insulation, so let's build in a little relief from the claustrophobia and confined spaces of the lower deck. We need a lounge area. A gallery, big windows, big TV screens, maybe even a painting or two on the wall. Of course, we're never going to get 20 people to agree on what to watch, so personal entertainment systems like VR headsets are going to become the preferred device for Martian travelers. The trick here is that during the transit in space, everyone can just float around. But once we land on Mars, gravity returns to the equation, so we do need enough furniture for 20 people. Couches and chairs and all that stuff. Moving up again, and deck seven would be great for an office or workspace. We are going to be away from the Earth for nearly three years, so we'll need something to keep us busy. They say an idle brain is the devil's workshop, and I don't know what we're supposed to do with people who go crazy, but I'd assume we might have to jettison you into space, so best to stay occupied. And then at the very top of our habitable zone, level eight, let's call that the flight deck. The bridge, if you want to use a Star Trek analogy. This is where the business of flying a spaceship happens. It's also where we strap in for launch and landing. Remember we talked about how SpaceX moved the landing fuel up into the nose cone so that it wouldn't slosh around? Well, we also don't want to be sloshed around during that pendulum swing that the ship is going to make as it transitions from a belly flop to a vertical landing. So we want to be as high up as possible when that happens. And assuming we've survived the landing, we are now residents of Mars, and the Starship will probably continue to be our home base for the duration of our stay until we build Elon's Mars City, which I think we are contractually obligated to help with while we're here, but that's a whole other video.