SpaceX plans to send five missions to Mars by 2026, says Elon Musk
SpaceX hopes to send five unmanned spacecraft to Mars in the coming years, says CEO Elon Musk said on its social media site, X. SpaceX has to wait for the next one Earth-Mars launch window before sending out the missions, Musk said. These windows occur when Mars and Earth align in such a way that flights between them require the least amount of energy and time. The next window is in 2026. If SpaceX misses that deadline, the next launch window is late 2028 to early 2029.
If the unmanned ships land safely on Mars, Musk expects to send crewed missions during the 2028-2029 launch window. If the tests fail, the company will retry uncrewed missions in the 2028 launch window, then return the crewed missions to the launch window.
SpaceX has yet to land the spaceship, the largest vehicle ever, on solid ground. During its last mission in June, the aircraft landed for the first time in the Indian Ocean.
“Regardless of what happens with the success of the landing, SpaceX will exponentially increase the number of spacecraft traveling to Mars with each transit opportunity,” Musk said on X.
The ultimate goal, according to Muskis building a self-sustaining Martian city in “about 20 years.” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell reiterated these claims in an interview with CNBC two years ago. The maximum payload of the spaceship is 150 tons.
A SpaceX representative did not respond to a request for comment.
SpaceX has challenges ahead
Musk is known to move the goalposts when it comes to SpaceX’s timeline for getting ships to Mars. Musk famously said four years ago that SpaceX would send ships to Mars in 2024. SpaceX has faced numerous issues including run-ins with the Federal Aviation Administration on procedural issues and battles with regulators about the environmental impact of the company’s launches.
Musk touched on these issues in another tweetsaying that one of his biggest concerns “is that the Starship program is being smothered by a mountain of government bureaucracy that is growing every year.” Musk blames “stifling red tape” for SpaceX’s inability to launch missions to Mars sooner and, pointing to the November election, predicts it would “grow under a Democratic Party administration.”
SpaceX is also facing delays in other sectors. NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, which uses SpaceX’s spacecraft, was originally planned for 2025 and has postponed to 2026. It will be the first manned mission to the moon in half a century, when it does eventually happen. According to Reuters, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa his flight cancelled around the moon, for which SpaceX’s spaceship would also be used.
