Years after touting the idea of making life multi-planetary by enabling humans to land on Mars, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is now contemplating names for the first city on Mars. His vote is on “Terminus.”
What Happened: “This has my vote,” Musk wrote on Monday in response to an X user who pitched “Terminus” as a good name for the first city on Mars.
Musk has often talked about making life multi-planetary by building a self-sustaining city on Mars and taking humans there. SpaceX’s ambitious launch vehicle Starship is expected to aid this dream.
Once the rocket makes it to Mars, multiple ships will move a lot of materials to the planet to help build a self-sustaining city, Musk previously said. These materials would include infrastructure for power generation, mining, propellant production, construction, and more as Mars is a rather "fixer-upper" planet, he added.
The billionaire, in 2020, even said that he wants to transport a million people to Mars by 2050.
Why It Matters: The Starship, however, is still in its development and testing phase. the vehicle has had 4 test flights since 2023.
While the spacecraft failed to reach space in the first flight, it reached space and exploded in the second test flight. During the third flight test, the spacecraft broke apart when re-entering Earth’s atmosphere from space.
However, the fourth flight test in June was a success, with the company checking all its test flight goals including reentry through Earth’s atmosphere and a soft splashdown of the spacecraft in the Indian Ocean.
SpaceX is expected to have at least six flights of the Starship this year, as per Musk’s latest estimate from March. For the next test flight, the company is expected to attempt landing the vehicle’s booster back at Starbase instead of splashing it down in the Gulf of Mexico, in what would be a significant demonstration of the vehicle’s reusability.
SpaceX's Falcon rocket is about 80% reusable, and the company is currently looking to ensure full reusability for its Starship rocket. Reuse of rockets, the company believes, is integral to bringing down the costs of spaceflight as the most cost is taken up in building the launch vehicle.
NASA is currently relying on the success of Starship to land humans back on the moon. The last crewed lunar mission occurred in 1972 with Apollo 17. Since then, no crew has traveled beyond low-Earth orbit.
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