Elon Musk's Mars Plans After Starship Test Flight

Okay, so you know how Elon Musk has this big dream of getting to Mars with his Starship thing? Well, just a couple days after the latest test flight didn't go so great, he said on Thursday that he thinks the first trip without people on board could happen by the end of next year. He even put out a whole timeline video from his company, SpaceX, that's in the Los Angeles area.

This came right after he said he was stepping down from being part of President Trump's government crew. You know, the one trying to cut down on all that government stuff. He'd mentioned before that he wanted to spend more time on his own businesses, like SpaceX and Tesla, which makes electric cars and batteries.

Now, Elon was pretty honest. He said this Mars plan really depends on Starship pulling off some pretty tricky things during its test flights. Like, it needs to be able to refuel way up in space after it launches. Getting to Mars by the end of 2026 is also a big deal because that's when Earth and Mars are lined up just right around the sun, making the trip the shortest it can be, like seven to nine months. He even said there's only a 50-50 chance of hitting that deadline. If it's not ready, he said they'd have to wait another two years. Bummer, right?

The first trip to Mars would actually have fake crews, like robots designed by Tesla called Optimus. Then, the first real people would go on the second or third landings. Elon's big picture is to send like 1,000 to 2,000 ships every two years to get a permanent human place going on Mars pretty quickly. Meanwhile, NASA is hoping to use Starship to get back to the moon around 2027, which hasn't happened since the Apollo days over 50 years ago. That's like a practice run before sending astronauts to Mars sometime in the 2030s.

Elon has always been more focused on getting humans to Mars. He even said way back he wanted to send an unmanned SpaceX ship to Mars by 2018 and have people there by 2024. He was supposed to do a livestream about making life multiplanetary from their launch site in Texas the other night, after Starship's ninth test flight. But the live stream got canceled out of nowhere because Starship, well, kinda spun out and blew up about 30 minutes after launch. It didn't even hit some of the main goals for that test.

The tests before that in January and March were even crazier. The spacecraft basically exploded right after taking off, sending pieces everywhere, even making planes change their routes. But Elon just brushed off this latest problem on X, saying they got a lot of 'good data' to look at and promising to launch more often for the next few tests.