Last year, SpaceX installed a huge sign at Starbase that says, “Gateway to Mars.” Elon Musk founded the company in 2002 with the money he got from selling PayPal, determined to colonize the Red Planet. Since then, SpaceX has achieved incredible feats, but its most optimistic plan to carry out Musk’s vision is at least 1,000 Starships and 20 years of work.
Before founding SpaceX, Musk was briefly on the board of the Mars Society, a nonprofit that promotes the human conquest of Mars. At one of the organization’s plenary sessions, Musk announced a project called Mars Oasis, which aimed to installed a small greenhouse on the Red Planet to reactivate public interest in Mars exploration.
Musk is ambitious, and the idea of cultivating plants on Mars ended up turning into something far more complex: turning humanity into a multiplanetary species that could survive a catastrophe on Earth. In other words, he wanted to create the necessary architecture for a human settlement on Mars that was self-sufficient.
The SpaceX CEO must have eventually thought about the possibility of creating his own rockets to go to Mars. Twenty years later, that’s exactly what he ended up doing with Starship.
1,000 Starships to Colonize Mars
Although its name and design have changed over the years, in the long term, the Starship program’s plan remains the same:
- Develop a huge rocket that is completely and rapidly reusable, as well as capable of launching more than 100 tons into space at minimum cost.
- Build a fleet of these rockets, financed by public and private funds, that can transport dozens of people to the Red Planet to create a manned base there.
- Enable thousands of these rockets to fly to Mars every time the planets are aligned to build a self-sufficient city with one million residents.
SpaceX still must demonstrate that it’s managed to create the first item on its list, but besides being ambitious, Musk is also optimistic. In 2019, the tech billionaire estimated that he would need 1,000 Starships and 20 years of launches to create a sustainable city on the Red Planet.
One of the last photos of Mars taken by NASA's InSight Mars lander in 2022.
Furthermore, he added that the cost of each launch would be $2 million dollars, an absurdly low cost according to industry standards. Launching a Falcon Heavy, the company’s most powerful rocket, costs 50 times more.
In 2020, Musk threw out some additional calculations. Starship’s objective is to fly three times per day 1,000 times a year. By these estimates, he could launch 1 megaton into orbit per year.
“Building 100 Starships/year gets to 1000 in 10 years or 100 megatons/year or maybe around 100k people per Earth-Mars orbital sync,” the SpaceX boss said on X.
Launch windows to Mars appear every 26 months, which is when the planet is closest to Earth. Musk believes that, if launches began in 2028, the Martian city with one million inhabitants could become reality in just 22 years, by 2050.
It’s an extremely optimistic view of what a company like SpaceX can do in a short amount of time, but there’s something you can’t deny about Musk: He’s had the same plan since he founded SpaceX. The company is now worth $180 billion. Starship exists. In fact, we’ve seen it go into space.
Images | SpaceX, NASA
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