SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on Saturday that the first Starship launch vehicles will launch to Mars in 2 years once the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens.
What Happened: The first launches to Mars in 2026, Musk said, will not have a crew onboard and will be aimed at testing the flight’s ability to land intact on Mars.
“If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years,” Musk wrote, pegging the first crewed Starship flights to the neighboring planet for 2028.
Musk has often reiterated his dreams of taking humans to Mars and building a self-sustaining city on the red planet. The CEO on Saturday said that the company is now eyeing building a self-sustaining Martian city in about 20 years.
The major hindrance to building a self-sustaining city on Mars is cost, according to Musk.
“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,” Musk wrote in another post.
Why It Matters: SpaceX is currently developing and testing its Starship launch vehicle. The vehicle last flew in the first half of June.
During the June test, the two stages of the vehicle – the Starship spacecraft and the Super Heavy booster – separated, and the booster subsequently had a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. The spacecraft ignited its engines and went into space, made a controlled re-entry to Earth, and had a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
The entire flight lasted one hour and six minutes from launch. The key object of the flight was to re-enter Earth and the mission achieved it while withstanding damage to the vehicle. The three flights before June accomplished less.
Starship is touted as the world's most powerful launch vehicle, standing 121 meters tall and weighing approximately 5,000 tonnes. SpaceX is expected to have at least six test flights of the Starship this year, as per Musk‘s latest estimate from March.
NASA is currently relying on the success of Starship to land humans back on the moon as part of its Artemis program. 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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