In his January inaugural address, President Donald Trump declared that we will “pursue our Manifest Density into the stars” and “plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.” He reiterated the Mars promise in his March 4 speech to a joint session of Congress. As for a timeline, SpaceX’s founder and CEO Elon Musk, stated in November that he is “highly confident” that we will send several of his company’s “Starships” to Mars in two years, and if those go well, with crewed missions to follow in four.
Meanwhile, on March 6, SpaceX’s latest Starship exploded mid-flight for the second time in a row, sending debris raining over Florida and the Caribbean, closing airports in the process.
Something’s not adding up.
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The stated goals of Mars landings in 2026 and 2028 do not correspond to a comprehensive, articulated plan. It’s simply the next open launch window, when Earth and Mars are in conjunction on the same side of the solar system, and transfers to that planet require the least amount of energy. It’s like announcing a camping trip on your next available weekend, without having purchased any camping supplies. And your car is in the shop. And has exploded.
So far, the only details of a Mars mission that Musk has shared consist of a brief comment on X, when someone asked him what cargo of the first Starship to the red planet would carry. His response: “Cybertrucks and Optimus robots.”
While such statements may play well to sycophants on social media, it’s nowhere near an actual plan to go to Mars, especially considering the calls to cut NASA’s science budget by up to 50 percent.
A mission to Mars is not outright impossible—there are no laws of physics that forbid it—and indeed SpaceX has made enormous strides in developing reusable rocket boosters. And I’m confident that Starship, with its impressive launch cadence, will achieve orbit and land safely back to Earth in short order. Even so, there’s still a long road to go to get to Mars.
In the 1960s the Apollo program went from blueprints to lunar landing in less than a decade. But Mars is another beast. At its closest approach, that planet is 56 million kilometers away—roughly 150 times the distance to the moon. Starship cannot launch directly from the Earth and reach Mars in one go. It must refuel in orbit, a technology only in its earliest development. While estimates vary, a full refill of Starship is likely to take an additional 10 to 20 tanker launches of fuel.
Next, Starship has to plunge through the thin Martian atmosphere and land on its cratered surface in a controlled, powered descent—something that no lander has ever achieved before. SpaceX was already contracted to provide the lunar lander for the Artemis mission, but last year a Government Accountability Office report found “significant issues with SpaceX’s supporting evidence that its mission can be achieved within schedule and acceptable risk.”
A crewed mission to Mars isn’t a one-way trip. A return journey would entail another launch from Mars, another transfer across interplanetary space, another plunge through an atmosphere, and another controlled landing—again, all never before done from interplanetary distances. The return trip fuel would either have to be transferred there ahead of time (meaning even more launches) or we must the develop the machinery to create methane from ice water and the thin carbon dioxide atmosphere on Mars—technologies that have yet to be demonstrated, let alone deployed.
And all this is just for the uncrewed, robotic proof-of-concept that Musk envisions for 2026. A crewed mission brings its own headaches. For starters, we have no working human-rated deep-space vehicle—at all. Starship will have to undergo rigorous installation and testing of life-support systems, and demonstrate a much higher degree of safety, to be certified to carry a human crew to Mars.
A typical Mars round trip takes around two years, including transfer time and waiting on the Martian surface for our planets to come back into conjunction. The record-holders for the longest duration stay at the International Space Station are cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub, at only 374 days. For the duration of a Mars mission, Starship would have to remain fully independent, unlike the ISS, which gets regular supplies and materials, not to mention constant guidance from the ground to fix the myriad issues that crop up.
Starship also has to protect the crew against cosmic radiation for those two years, and maintain their health against the ravages of microgravity. Research into this is one of the primary motivations for the ISS, which Musk called for deorbiting after insulting one of its former commanders.
Plus, Starship can’t just be a transit vehicle. It also has to be (or at least provide for) the operating base on the Martian surface. Whatever Starship is at this point, it’s definitely not that. No Starship has even successfully landed on Earth yet.
We are very, very far away from these ideas becoming prototypes, let alone robust mission components.
Indeed, the U.S. was developing exactly those mission components when, in 2016, the Obama administration announced a pivot from the moon-focused initiative of the Bush years with a focus on getting to Mars in the 2030s. Then Trump reversed that by disregarding Mars and aiming again for the moon with the Artemis project.
Now with Musk calling the moon a “distraction,” rumors are swirling that the second Trump administration may cancel Artemis—calls that seem to come from Musk’s insistence that we “colonize Mars.”
The only way we’re going to Mars is by spending a lot of money. Likely, up to trillions of dollars. Perhaps that’s Musk’s real aim—to funnel enormous sums of money away from researchers at NASA and its partners and into his privately-held company without having to answer to shareholders or deliver on promised schedules. A bold enough claim could substantially increase his already vast fortune.
Followers of Musk are used to his audacious, and sometimes incredible, assertions. For example, Tesla drivers are still waiting for their vehicles’ “Full Self Driving” system to achieve “Level 5” autonomy, which was supposed to occur in 2021; meanwhile, the system’s under scrutiny for fatal accidents. But while statements of grand ambition may excite shareholders and fans, they don’t make for sound space progress. If we keep whipsawing between priorities, and allow outlandish, self-interested claims to direct policy, the only place we’ll be going is nowhere.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
