His other efforts — launching satellites, beaming internet from space, and flying astronauts to the International Space Station —are just means to that end. "I think we need to become a multi-planet species, and we were clearly not getting there based on the progress in the space industry," Musk said in 2012."So I started SpaceX to try to solve that problem."For years, his ideas for a rocket and spaceship capable of transporting people to Mars were purely theoretical.
The ITS name was ditched in favor of BFR, which stands for"Big F---ing Rocket" or"Big Falcon Rocket," depending on who you ask.Visually, BFR looked a lot like ITS, though it was slightly scaled down, with the bottom rocket booster was shown to have 31 engines instead of 42.Musk in 2017 addressed one question that skeptics had been kicking around for the past year: How SpaceX planned to pay for this thing.