Elon Musk is speaking at the virtual #HumansToMars conference (he's dialing in from Germany):
Given enough time SpaceX will get to Mars
I want to emphasize that this is a very hard and dangerous difficult thing, not for the faint of heart .. It's gonna be tough going and be pretty glorious if it works out
We're making good progress. The thing that really impedes progress on Starship is the production system ... A year ago was nothing there and now we've got quite a lot of production capability. So we're rapidly making more and more ships
SpaceX is trying to simplify the configuration of Starship's Super Heavy booster, so the engine configuration might end up being 28 instead of 31 engines.
Starship over time will be able to launch over 100 tons of cargo.
The first orbital Starship flights "might not work" since the company is in "uncharted territory."
SpaceX has not done much work on Starship's cabin/interior "because we've got to first make the thing work and do hundreds of missions with satellites before we put people on board."
The outer ring of booster engines (20 of 28) have no TVC actuators. Steering control comes from center 8 TVC & differential throttle of outer engines. By any measure, the high thrust variant of Raptor will probably have the high T/W of any engine ever.
Over time, outer 20 will have ~300 tons of thrust & inner 8 ~210, so roughly 7500 tons total at sea level or 1.5 T/W for booster+ship