Space & Astronomy

Elon Musk: 'first crewed mission to Mars will launch within 4 years'

By T.K. Randall
September 9, 2024 ·  40 comments

Concept image of Starship reaching Earth's orbit. Image Credit: SpaceX Elon Musk is certainly no stranger to making overly ambitious promises about the timing of upcoming space missions and his most recent comments are no exception.

"The first Starships to Mars will launch in two years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens," he wrote.

"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 four years."

"Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years. 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."Musk went on to explain that the key to getting a lot of people and equipment to Mars is reducing how much it costs to actually transport them to the Red Planet.

"SpaceX created the first fully reusable rocket stage and, much more importantly, made the reuse economically viable," he wrote. "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."

Whether SpaceX will actually be able to deliver on his extremely ambitious promise to have astronauts visiting Mars within just four years, however, remains to be seen.

Source: Space.com | Comments (40)

Tags: Elon Musk, Mars