Musk reveals timescale for manned Mars mission

SpaceX will launch its first crewed flights to Mars in four years if its unmanned landings go well, CEO Elon Musk has said.

The first uncrewed Starships to the Red Planet are expected to be launched in two years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens, the billionaire announced on social media on Saturday.

“These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars,” Musk explained in a post on X. He expressed hope that if those landings go well, his space company will launch its first crewed flights to Mars in four years.

The idea of building a sustainable human settlement on Mars within two decades is not out of reach, the billionaire pledged.

“Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years,” Musk said, stressing that being multi-planetary will “vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness.” “We will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet,” the SpaceX founder explained.

In another post, he said SpaceX had created the first fully reusable rocket stage and, much more importantly, made the launch process economically viable.

Making life multi-planetary is “fundamentally a cost per ton to Mars problem,” Musk said. “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,” he concluded.

In June, a Starship rocket returned from space and successfully landed in the Indian Ocean, completing a full mission around the globe on its fourth test flight.

The entrepreneur is counting on Starship, the largest rocket ever made, to help him achieve his goal of building a spacecraft capable of sending humans and cargo to the Moon later this decade and eventually to Mars.

The Starship spacecraft is designed to carry “both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond,” SpaceX’s website notes.

Mars is one of Earth’s “closest habitable neighbors,” and has “decent sunlight,” the site continues. “It is a little cold, but we can warm it up.”

Gravity on Mars is about 38% that of Earth, “making it possible to lift heavy things and bound around,” SpaceX noted. “Furthermore, the day is remarkably close to that of Earth.”

In February, Musk said that he wants to take one million people to Mars, claiming that he is working on a “game plan” to achieve this. “Humanity should have a moon base, cities on Mars, and be out there among the stars,” he said.

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