San Francisco: Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, said Sunday that the first uncrewed Starship mission will launch to the Red Planet in two years, when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens. Starship is the world’s most powerful rocket and will be used to send humans to the Moon and then, eventually, to Mars.
In a post on social media platform X, the tech billionaire said that “the first spacecraft to Mars will launch in 2 years, when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens.” “These ships will be uncrewed to test the reliability of an intact landing on Mars. If those landings go well, the first manned flights to Mars will be in 4 years,” Musk announced.
According to him, the flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years. “Being multiplanetary will greatly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, since we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on a single planet,” said the owner of X.
His aerospace company SpaceX has created the first fully reusable rocket stage and, more importantly, made reusability economically viable. “Making life multiplanetary is fundamentally a cost per ton of payload problem on Mars. It currently costs about $1 billion per ton of payload on the surface of Mars,” Musk said.
That price would have to be raised to $100,000 per tonne to build a self-sufficient city there, “so the technology would have to be 10,000 times better. It is extremely difficult, but not impossible,” he added.
SpaceX recently launched the third test flight of its 120-meter-tall Starship rocket, along with the Heavy rocket. Starship consists of a giant first-stage booster rocket called Super Heavy and a 50-meter-tall upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship.
SpaceX CEO plans to send at least a million people to Mars. “Humanity should have a lunar base, cities on Mars and be out there among the stars,” said the X owner.
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