Elon Musk-Led Space

San Francisco: Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Sunday said that the first uncrewed Starship mission will be launched to the Red Planet in two years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens. Starship is the world’s most powerful rocket and will be used to send humans to the Moon and then eventually to Mars.

In a post on “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,” Musk announced.

According to him, flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years. “Being multi-planetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet,” said the X owner.

His aerospace company SpaceX has created the first fully reusable rocket stage and, much more importantly, made the reuse economically viable. “Making life multi-planetary is fundamentally a cost per tonne to Mars problem. It currently costs about a billion dollars per ton of useful payload to the surface of Mars,” informed Musk.

That needs to be improved to $100,000/tonnes to build a self-sustaining city there, “so the technology needs to be 10,000 times better. Extremely difficult, but not impossible,” he added.

SpaceX recently launched the third test flight of its 400-foot-tall Starship rocket, along with the Heavy booster. Starship consists of a giant first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 50 meters upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship.

The SpaceX CEO eventually plans to shift at least one million people to Mars. “Humanity should have a moon base, cities on Mars and be out there among the stars,” the X owner said.