Elon Musk's Big Mars Plans
Okay, so get this. Just two days after his super-duper big Mars spaceship, Starship, had another hiccup during a test flight, Elon Musk was like, 'Yeah, we'll send it to Mars, without anyone on it, by the end of next year.' He showed off this whole detailed plan online through his rocket company, SpaceX. This was right after he said he was stepping away from that big government job he had with President Trump, the one where he was trying to cut down on red tape. Apparently, he wanted to spend more time on his own stuff, like SpaceX and Tesla, you know, the electric cars and batteries company?
Now, Elon admitted that hitting that Mars deadline totally depends on whether Starship can pull off some seriously tricky stuff during its test flights. Especially this one thing where it has to refuel itself in space after taking off. He said the end of 2026 is a good time because that's when Mars and Earth are closest, which only happens every couple of years. The trip would still take, like, seven to nine months. He gave it a 50-50 shot of actually making it then. If not, he figures they'll just wait another two years before trying again.
The plan is for the first trip to Mars to have some robots on it, kind of like the Optimus ones Tesla makes. Then, real people would go on the second or third trips. Elon's big picture is to send, like, a thousand or two thousand of these ships to Mars every two years! He wants to get a permanent human home going there fast.
Meanwhile, NASA is hoping to get people back on the moon using Starship around 2027. That's over 50 years since the last time we landed humans there with the Apollo missions. They see that as like a practice run for sending astronauts to Mars sometime in the 2030s. Elon, though, he's always been more focused on Mars. He even talked about sending an unmanned SpaceX ship there as early as 2018 and having a crewed mission by 2024. Didn't quite happen that way, you know?
He was even supposed to give a talk called 'The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary' recently after a test flight. But that webcast got canceled because, well, the Starship kinda spun out and blew up. Didn't even hit all the goals for the test, which lasted about 30 minutes and got halfway to where it was supposed to go. The tests before that, in January and March, were even crazier. They just blew up right after they launched, sending pieces everywhere! It even made planes have to change their routes.
But Elon just brushed off the latest one on X, saying they got lots of 'good data to review' and promised to launch the next ones faster. Idk, what do you think about all this Mars stuff?
