2024-09-25 02:04:39
Thousands of Starships planned
Musk dreams of Mars trips for everyone
Updated on 24.09.2024 – 13:08Reading time: 3 min.
Mars must be colonized before Earth runs out of resources, says Elon Musk. The SpaceX boss detailed his space travel plans for the coming years.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk has shared his vision of Mars flights for the masses. “We want to empower anyone who wants to be a space traveler to travel to Mars! That means you or your family or friends – anyone who dreams of great adventures,” Musk wrote on his short message platform X on Sunday. Eventually there will be thousands of “Starships” flying to Mars.
Musk specified SpaceX’s Mars plans: The company wants to launch about five unmanned spacecraft to Mars in 2026. If all of them land safely on the planet, the first missions with astronauts will be possible in four years – if difficulties arise, manned missions will be postponed for another two years.
According to Musk, travel from Earth to Mars is only possible every two years. The distance between the two planets varies considerably, as both have their own orbits around the sun. Missions are targeted at the time windows in which the distance is smallest.
Regardless of the success of the landings, SpaceX will increase the number of ships flying to Mars “exponentially” with each such transit opportunity, the multi-billionaire wrote.
The fundamental question is whether humanity will succeed in establishing itself permanently on several planets before Earth’s society is so weakened by global catastrophes that it can no longer send supplies to Mars, the 53-year-old stressed.
“One day, humans will fly to Mars and hopefully back,” Europe’s former space chief Jan Wörner told the German Press Agency. However, the dangers of a mission to Mars are significantly greater than those to the moon.
“Firstly, the length of the journey with no chance of a quick return, secondly, the transmission time for emergency communications, thirdly, high levels of radiation over a long period of time and fourthly, the psychological challenges.”
The former Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA) also urges caution in other respects: He has a very bad feeling about colonising other planets as a way out for an Earth that is not protected.
Tourism is great, said Wörner. “But the ecological consequences must not be ignored. We are discussing heavy fuel oil in cruise ships – any leisure space flight is ecologically unacceptable.”
Rockets for space flights have a greater impact on the climate than is often assumed: they produce harmful nitrogen oxides, contribute to the depletion of the ozone layer and accelerate global warming.
At the end of 2022, a team led by Robert Ryan from University College London calculated that three years of space tourism could be enough to generate twice as many climate-damaging emissions as all scientific space missions combined.
Last year, SpaceX’s “Starship”, the largest and most powerful rocket system ever built, exploded during several test flights. On the fourth attempt, the unmanned rocket made it into space and later landed in the Indian Ocean, albeit damaged.
In mid-September, the four-person crew of the private “Polaris Dawn” mission, in which SpaceX was involved, returned safely after a journey of several days in space up to 1,400 kilometers from Earth, including a walk in space. Their launch had previously been postponed several times.
According to SpaceX, this mission was also part of the preparations for extraterrestrial settlements: “Millions of spacesuits are needed to build a base on the moon and a city on Mars,” said the project planners. The spacewalks that have now been completed are an important step in the development of spacesuits for long-term missions in space. Most recently, Musk assumed that a self-sufficient city on Mars would be possible in 20 years.