Elon Musk’s SpaceX is only two years away from launching missions to Mars, the CEO has claimed, in a timeline announced to coincide with the way Earth and Mars align for potential interplanetary missions once every 26 months.
Increasing the “lifespan of consciousness”
The Starship missions will launch in the first instance without humans on board. “These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars,” Musk said on X, on Saturday, 7 September. “If those landings go well,” he added, “then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years.”
In the same series of posts, Musk also reiterated previous comments about prolonging the existence of the human race. “Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years,” he said. “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.”
The space craft destined for the missions is a stainless-steel construction in two main parts: a so-called “Super Heavy” first-stage booster plus the 50 metre-tall upper-stage known as the Starship, a combination described by Space.com as “the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built.” At a stacked 122 metres in height, it can produce 16.7 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. That’s almost double the Space Launch System employed on NASA’s Artemis moon program.
Explosions create potential for loss of vehicle or crew
Though Starship is supposed to be fully and rapidly reusable after each liftoff, launches so far have caused immense damage to take-off and landing platforms, as well as generating quantities of particulate pollution and debris that critics have denounced as both environmentally unsound as well as dangerous for future missions.
A 2024 study by UCF planetary physicist Phil Metzger, found that the destruction following the company’s April launch was the result of “an explosion comparable to a volcanic eruption, where it blew chunks of concrete at 90 meters per second,” Aerospace America has reported. “If you’re trying to lift off from the moon and you get hit by chunks of concrete traveling that fast, that would be loss of vehicle or loss of crew,” the researcher said, adding that “in the reduced lunar gravity, such objects could travel distances up to 6 kilometres.”
“Chopstick” arms
SpaceX has not commented on that study but has claimed that its test missions up to now, despite explosions, have shown successive progress and met expectations, with “all major objectives” achieved, Space.com says. A fifth mission is now overdue, originally planned for July.
According to trail animations released by Musk, it will supposedly involve a debut attempt to re-land Super Heavy on the launch pad for the first time, bringing into play the tower’s grabbers, dubbed “chopstick arms” that effectively “catch” the booster stage and bring it back to Earth.
