If you want to get to Mars, timing is everything, and Elon Musk no longer believes SpaceX will make it to the red planets when the next time window opens in 2022.
The world's leading fan, had to leave this world had previously hoped to send a robotic mission to Mars in 2022A trip with a crew followed a few years later. During an interview at the Mars Society's virtual meeting on Friday, Musk said he now thinks his next-generation spacecraft could be ready as early as 2023, in time for a launch window in 2024.
The orbits of Earth and Mars around the Sun bring the two planets closest to each other approximately every two years. That's why we saw three robot missions to our neighboring world, including NASA's Perseverance rover, will launch within a few weeks in July.
"I think we have a chance to fight," Musk said as he made the Mars 2024 transport window.
To get there, Musk says his team needs to speed up their pace of innovation and he's not afraid of breaking a few things along the way.
"We're likely to lose a few ships," he said when asked about the development process for Starship, which will eventually bring dozens of people to Mars at once.
So far, early Starship prototypes have made short, low-altitude "jumps" out of the SpaceX test facility in Texas. Musk hopes the early models will make it into orbit for the first time next year. He added that the company could demonstrate its refueling capability in orbit in 2022 and begin voyages to the moon shortly thereafter.
The company's founder and chief engineer warned that he had no secret data for reaching these milestones.
"These are just guesses," Musk told Mars Society President Robert Zubrin of Zoom.
Who can go to Mars, Musk said, once there are a million people who both want to go to the red planet and can afford it, that should be enough to preserve a city. In other words, it seems that the first Martians are likely to be wealthy Earth people.
Once on Mars, Musk said, the first task will be to build a fuel facility. He also mentioned the idea of sending robotic droids to the surface that humans could remotely control from Earth.
Of course, Musk has designs on more than Mars too. He mentioned the idea of using Starship or some other vehicle to visit that suddenly exciting atmosphere of Venus, large asteroids, the moons of Jupiter and even the Kuiper Belt and the most distant areas of the solar system.
"We have to make the leap to go to another planet first," he said.
