Elon Musk's Mars Ambitions: Starship's Next Steps
So, get this: just a couple of days after his super big Starship thingy had another little hiccup during a test flight, Elon Musk was like, 'Hey, maybe we'll send this bad boy to Mars without anyone on it by the end of next year.' He even put out this video from his company, SpaceX, based near Los Angeles, where he laid out his plan for getting to Mars. This came right after he said he was dipping out of President Trump's team, where he was trying to cut down on government red tape.
He'd already been talking about stepping back from government stuff anyway to focus more on his businesses. You know, things like SpaceX and Tesla, the electric car and battery company. But, and this is a big 'but,' he admitted that getting to Mars by then totally depends on Starship pulling off some seriously tricky maneuvers during its test flights. One of the main ones is getting refueled while it's zooming around Earth.
He said the end of 2026 is actually a pretty good time to go 'cause it's when Mars and Earth are closest in their journey around the sun. This happens only every couple of years, you know? It makes the trip way shorter, like seven to nine months. He gave his company a 50/50 shot of actually making it by that deadline. And if they don't? Well, he figures they'll just have to wait another two years before trying again.
The first trip to Mars won't have humans on it, though. He said they'll send robots from Tesla, the Optimus kind. The first humans would follow later, on the second or third landing. Can you even imagine? He's thinking eventually they'll launch like, a thousand or even two thousand ships to Mars every two years! The idea is to quickly set up a place where people can live on their own, like a permanent settlement. Pretty wild, right?
Meanwhile, NASA is hoping to land humans back on the moon using Starship as early as 2027. That's like, over 50 years after the last time we were there during the Apollo days! They see it as a stepping stone, I guess, to getting astronauts to Mars sometime in the 2030s.
Elon has always been super into getting humans to Mars. He even said way back that he wanted to send an unmanned SpaceX ship there by 2018 and have people there by 2024. Yeah, that didn't quite happen, did it?
He was actually supposed to do this live talk called 'The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary' from their launch site in Texas recently, right after the ninth test flight of Starship. But then, bam! The webcast got canceled without a word after Starship, like, lost control and blew up into a fireball about half an hour after it launched. It didn't even hit some of the main goals for that test. The two test flights before that, back in January and March, were even crazier. The spacecraft just blew up right after taking off, and pieces went flying over the Caribbean. It even made a bunch of planes have to change their routes just to be safe.
But Elon? He just seemed to shrug it off. He posted on X, saying they got a lot of 'good data to review' and promised they'd be launching test flights way quicker now. Idk, it's a wild ride, isn't it?
