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Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Elon Musk says his SpaceX company will conduct its first crewed mission to Mars “within four years.”
Oh, right. In 2020, Elon Musk said SpaceX will have put humans on Mars by the year 2026, if not sooner.
Apparently, the timetable for him becoming the supreme ruler of Mars has been pushed back a little bit.
SpaceX’s Starship and their Super Heavy rockets will still begin taking trips to Mars in 2026, there just won’t be any people on board. (Hopefully, they won’t explode.)
That, according to Elon Musk, will begin with the first crewed flights to Mars in 2028.
“The first Starships to Mars will launch in 2 years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens,” Musk claimed on X (Twitter) Saturday evening.
“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,” Musk continued. “Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet.”
He did not make any mention of his previous warning that there is a “good chance” that the first settlers on Mars will die.
Elon Musk also explained in another post, “SpaceX created the first fully reusable rocket stage and, much more importantly, made the reuse economically viable.
“Making life multiplanetary is fundamentally 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.”
What may eventually become impossible is actually getting to space because of all the space debris that is clogging up our atmosphere, thanks to him and others.
Then again, this is the same man who promised he would have one million Tesla robotaxis on the road by the year 2020. So take any of his bold proclamations with a grain of salt.