Mars has long been an object of fascination for those of us on earth, and we may be closer to learning more about it. SpaceX is planning to send five Ucluede Star Ships to Mars over the next few years, CEO Elon Musk said on his social media site, X. According to Musk, SpaceX has to wait for the next Earth-Mars launch window before sending the missions. These windows occur when Mars and Earth are set up in such a way that flights between them take the least energy and time. The next window is in 2026, and SpaceX should miss the deadline the next launch window is late 2028 at the beginning of 2029.
If the non-locked ships land safely on Mars, Musk expects to send crew missions during the 2028-29 launch window. If the tests are unsuccessful, the company will try uncluede missions again in the 2028 launch window and push the herd tasks back to the launch window after that.
SpaceX has not yet landed the Star Ship, its largest vehicle ever, on solid ground. On its latest mission in June, it landed the craft for the first time in the Indian Ocean.
“Whatever happens to landing success, SpaceX will increase the number of spaceships traveling to Mars exponentially with any transit opportunity,” Musk said at X.
The ultimate goal, according to the Musk, is the building of a self -supporting Martian city in “about 20 years.” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell repeated these claims two years ago in an interview with CNBC. Starship’s maximum payload is 150 tonnes.
A representative of SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
SpaceX has challenges ahead
Musk has been known to move the target posts when it comes to SpaceX’s timeline to get ships for Mars. Musk said famous four years ago that SpaceX would send ships to Mars in 2024. SpaceX has been dealing with several problems, including run-ins with the Federal Aviation Administration on procedural issues and matches with regulators on the environmental impact of the company’s launches.
Musk touched these issues in another tweet and said one of his biggest concerns “is that the Starship program is suffocated by a mountain of government bureaucracy growing every year.” Musk accuses “suffocating bureaucracy” of SpaceX’s inability to launch missions to Mars before and refer to the November election predicts it would “grow under a democratic party administration.”
SpaceX also faces delays in other sectors. NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, which uses SpaceX’s Starship, was originally scheduled for 2025 and has been pushed back to 2026. It will be the first crew to the moon for half a century when it eventually happens. Per Reuters canceled the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa his flight around the moon, also intended to use SpaceX’s Starship.