It looked for all the world like something that might have graced the cover of a 1950s comic book. On September 28th, on a warm Texas evening, Elon Musk, the boss of SpaceX, a rocketry firm, unveiled his company's newest machine, Starship Mk1. It stands 50 metres tall and is made from shiny plates of stainless steel. Despite its name, it is not in fact an interstellar spacecraft. But it is a prototype of an interplanetary one. Mr Musk hopes, one day, to use its successors to ferry passengers to the Moon or to Mars—or perhaps even, according to one piece of SpaceX concept art, all the way to Saturn.
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