Elon Musk Eyes 2026 for First Starship Trip to Mars

So, guess what? Just two days after his big Mars spacecraft, Starship, had another little hiccup during a test flight, Elon Musk spilled the beans on Thursday. He thinks this cool, futuristic vehicle might take its first trip without anyone on board to the red planet late next year. Pretty wild, right?

Elon shared all the deets about how they're planning to get Starship ready in a video his rocket company, SpaceX, put out online. This was just a day after he mentioned he was stepping away from President Donald Trump's team, where he was trying to cut down on government red tape. The billionaire guy had already said he wanted to focus more on his businesses, like SpaceX and his electric car company, Tesla.

Now, Elon was straight up about it. He said getting to Mars by his deadline totally depends on Starship pulling off some serious technical tricks during test flights. The biggest one? Refueling in space after it launches. That's a tough one! Why the end of 2026? Well, Mars and Earth line up closer to each other about every two years, making the trip quicker. It would still take like, seven to nine months to get there. He figures they've got a 50-50 shot of making that deadline. If they miss it, he figures they'll just have to wait two more years to try again.

The first flight to Mars will have some pretend crew, maybe robots that look like those Tesla-built Optimus ones. The first real people will follow later, on the second or third landings. Elon's big dream is to send a ton of ships, maybe 1,000 to 2,000, every two years to Mars. This would help them build a town there that can take care of itself, a permanent home for humans.

Meanwhile, NASA is also planning to use Starship to get people back to the moon by 2027. That's over 50 years since we last landed someone up there during the Apollo days. This lunar trip is like a stepping stone to eventually sending astronauts to Mars sometime in the 2030s. Elon, who really wants to see humans go to Mars sooner, had actually aimed to send an unmanned SpaceX ship there back in 2018 and wanted to send people in 2024.

Elon was supposed to do a live talk about making life happen on more than one planet from the SpaceX launch site in Texas on Tuesday night. This was right after Starship's ninth test flight that evening. But the webcast got canceled without a word. Why? Because Starship, like, spun out of control and blew up into a fireball about 30 minutes after taking off. It didn't even hit some of its most important test goals. The two test flights before that, in January and March, were even crazier failuress. The spacecraft basically blew up right after launching, sending pieces flying over the Caribbean and making lots of planes change their routes just to be safe.

But Elon? He just kind of brushed off the latest problem on Tuesday. He posted on X and said they got a bunch of 'good data to review' and promised they'd launch the next few test flights faster. Gotta keep trying, I guess!