SpaceX Elon Musk is adamant that his space company will eventually make humanity interplanetary by establishing a permanent presence on Mars.
It’s an extremely ambitious plan, and one that intimately involves the company’s massive Starship rocket. If his characteristically unrealistic timelines are anything to go by, the first crewed trip to the Red Planet could take place “as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely,” he asserted in a March 15 tweet.
But not everybody would agree with that assessment.
“We’re a good 15 years away from going to Mars, not five years as Elon Musk alludes to,” former NASA astronaut José Hernández told The Hill.
To Hernández, who traveled to space in 2009 onboard NASA’s Space Shuttle, there’s vastly more work required before we’re ready to send the first crew to the planet some 140 million miles away.
“As I’ve always said… space travel is not trivial, and so what we need to do next is, we’re going to retire the International Space Station, invest that — that operational money in developing a lunar base where technologies that are needed to go to Mars need to be developed and tested and proved, because right now, there’s too many technical hurdles,” Hernández said.
The news comes the same week as the return of NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who have been stranded on board the International Space Station since last June due to the failure of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.
Hernández may have a point when it comes to the many technical hurdles SpaceX is facing. Its development of Starship has run into serious roadblocks as of late, with two consecutive prototypes blowing up in mid-flight.
Put simply, the Musk-led firm is still a long way from boarding astronauts. SpaceX has yet to publicly address its progress when it comes to life support systems, on-orbit refueling, and extraterrestrial landing procedures, to name just a few aspects of a future mission to Mars.
In the meantime, NASA is still hoping to use Starship during its Artemis III mission, the first crewed trip to the lunar surface in over half a century.
Last year, SpaceX tested a lunar lander docking system to safely transfer NASA astronauts from the agency’s Orion capsule to the Starship Human Landing System (HLS) while in orbit around the Moon. In 2023, NASA astronauts also tested a concept for a SpaceX elevator to take crews from the towering rocket down to the surface.
Other than that, we’ve heard little else from the company about the readiness of its landing system for NASA’s mission, which is still tentatively scheduled for 2027.
To make the jump from there to Mars — which would go against Musk’s wishes of skipping the Moon altogether — a planet that’s roughly 500 times further away from Earth than the Moon, will be an immense step up in complexity and difficulty. The journey could easily take several months, requiring a highly complex life support system that’s never been developed before.
Experts have also warned of the immense amount of space radiation future space travelers would be exposed to. Microgravity could also have undesirable effects on human health, as previous research has shown.
Before risking the lives of astronauts, Musk is planning to send uncrewed Starships to the surface of Mars. But whether that will happen “well before 2030,” as the billionaire has promised in the past, remains unclear at best.
Others have also questioned Musk’s justification for colonizing the Red Planet in the first place.
“Even after a nuclear war, Earth would be more liveable than Mars, even if we didn’t do anything about [climate change] it would still have oxygen — as far as we can tell, Mars does not,” former president Barack Obama said during an event last year, as quoted by Agence France-Presse.
And if humans ever make it there, the trip will likely be grueling, as Musk has admitted himself.
“Not for the faint of heart,” the mercurial CEO said during a 2020 summit. “Good chance you’ll die. And it’s going to be tough, tough going, but it’ll be pretty glorious if it works out.”
More on Starship: Elon Musk Is Not Taking the Latest Starship Explosion Well
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