It has been a while since we last heard the specifics about Elon Musk’s plan to colonize Mars. With the biggest space rocket in history, Starship, launching its first test mission around the Earth, it is the right time to bring that topic back into the spotlight, though.
Elon Musk announced that the first Starships to Mars will launch in two years during the minimum-energy transfer window between Earth and Mars that occurs roughly every two years (the upcoming one begins in October of this year):
“These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years.
“Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years. Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metaphorically, on one planet.”
The founder and CEO of SpaceX thinks that making life multiplanetary—his long-term goal—is fundamentally just a cost per ton to Mars problem: It currently costs about a billion dollars per ton of useful payload to the surface of Mars. That needs to be improved to $100k/ton to build a self-sustaining city there, so the technology needs to be 10,000 times better. Extremely difficult, but not impossible.”
SpaceX is currently preparing for the fifth flight of Starship. The June last test mission (ITF-4) was a huge success, with both Starship and the Super Heavy booster landing vertically for the very first time.
The goal for the upcoming ITF-5 mission is even more ambitious, though. It seems SpaceX is all-in for the historic Super Heavy landing at the launch tower. It is supposed to use its “chopsticks” to catch the giant booster in the air, hoping that this procedure will make the future recovery and reuse of SpaceX rockets much quicker.
The Starship was initially announced in 2016. Known as the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) at the time, it aimed for the first uncrewed missions in 2022 and the first astronauts on Mars in 2024. Given Musk’s track record of unrealistic timelines, one can’t be surprised that the timeline had to be adjuste. Nott many will be surprised if the currently announced timeline sees its own correction in the future.