Elon Musk has offered a tantalizing peek behind the curtain at SpaceX’s evolving ambitions to establish a permanent human presence on Mars. In a newly released video presentation to employees, Elon laid out concrete steps for turning science fiction into reality.
Central to SpaceX’s extraterrestrial expansion plans is making the company’s under-development Starship rocket fully and “rapidly reusable” through a series of key upgrades. Starship represents the core enabler to affordably ferry massive payloads – and eventually humans – to the Red Planet and beyond.
In the next month, Musk revealed that SpaceX will attempt landing the flight 4 Starship prototype on an offshore “virtual tower” during an upcoming test flight. If that ambitious mid-air retrieval is successful, the following flight 5 Starship will target landing directly back on the launch tower itself.
Hitting such dizzying reusability milestones is critical for transforming SpaceX’s launch cadence and economics. After all, millions of tons of supplies and infrastructure must be pre-positioned on Mars to support a permanent human colony under Musk’s multiplanetary vision.
So just how big does the Elon Musk want that future Martian metropolis to be? According to the presentation, “What we’re building today will enable sending around a million people and several million tonnes to the Martian surface in the years to come.”
That’s an almost incomprehensibly massive objective – transporting approximately 0.13% of Earth’s current population to another planet entirely over an unspecified timeframe.
Of course, meeting that lofty population goal requires clearing several more tantalizing milestones first:
- Nailing Starship’s reusability upgrades
- Executing numerous uncrewed cargo missions
- Establishing initial surface outposts
- Producing rocket propellant on Mars itself using local resources
With NASA’s Artemis missions also queued up to return humans to the lunar surface, SpaceX and its indefatigable CEO clearly have their sights trained firmly on the final frontier. As Musk proclaimed: “Excitement will continue to be guaranteed with Starship.”