Elon Musk: ‘first Starships to Mars will launch in 2 years’

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has revealed an ambitious plan to build a human city on Mars within the next few decades beginning with uncrewed Starship voyages in 2026. 

If all goes well, according to Musk, crewed trips will begin by the end of the decade. 

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk reveals the roadmap for putting humans on Mars. Source: Elon Musk

Transfer Windows

SpaceX will begin launching Starship spacecraft with the intent of landing on the surface of Mars in 2 years. The timing is based on when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens in late 2026. 

A chart showing factors surrounding the transfer window for an Earth to Mars launch. Source: JSASS Aerospace, Japan

The first flights will be uncrewed to test Starship’s landing capabilities and ensure crew safety once humans are aboard. The first crewed voyages will begin between two and four years later depending on how the initial testing goes. 

The seemingly urgent timelines for the missions may be affected by Musk’s continuing insistence that lower birthrates are among the greatest threats to our species. 

Per Musk’s post:

“Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet.”

Satellites and Blockchain

Musk’s post also mentioned that the purpose of the Mars venture was to build a functional human city within the next 20 years. According to him the challenges standing in the way are largely based on economics and technology:

“It currently costs about a billion dollars per ton of useful payload to the surface of Mars. That needs to be improved to $100k/ton to build a self-sustaining city there, so the technology needs to be 10,000 times better. Extremely difficult, but not impossible.”

The creation of such a massive increase in efficiency in such a short period of time could require a radical restructuring of how space-based logistics and communications are handled. 

Related: Elon Musk did not volunteer his sperm to seed a colony on Mars

According to NASA research, using blockchain technology to orchestrate, execute, and verify communication between satellites may be the most efficient and future-facing method for advancing space-based logistics handling. 

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Musk’s SpaceX is perhaps the most well-positioned organization on Earth when it comes to the potential for implementing blockchain technology within a cluster of satellites and/or spacecraft. 

A Sept. 6 report from The Independent indicates that SpaceX has 6,370 active Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit. This, according to the report, means the company controls more than 62% of all active satellites. 

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