SpaceX wants to send humans to Mars by 2028, here's why it won't

Digital Trends

7 days ago

This week saw another dramatic test of SpaceX's Starship, when the mighty rocket exploded once again, and both the upper and lower stages were lost. The test wasn't a complete failure, as the upper stage did reach space for the first time, but it's clear that there's still a lot of work to do to make the world's most powerful rocket something that can be relied on for its eventual intended use: carrying crew to Mars.
Undaunted by this latest setback, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced in a talk shared yesterday, May 29, that the company would be sending 'millions of people' to Mars, in order to create a 'self-sustaining civilization' there. The aim, Musk says, is to launch a Starship to Mars by 2026, and if that goes well, then to launch a crewed mission two years later, in late 2028 or early 2029.
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Musk gave further details about the timeline for a Starship launch to Mars in an interview on CBS Sunday Morning this week. 'If we're lucky, we've probably got about a 50% chance of sending ships from Earth to Mars at the end of next year,' he said. 'So November, December next year. In about 18 months.'
Pushed on whether this timeline was realistic, Musk admitted that, 'I try to give the 50th percentile. So you should expect half the time I'm wrong.'
To be entirely fair to Musk, it's good to acknowledge your own fallibility, and it's good to be ambitious. But projecting a launch to another planet by 2026 seems precipitate when the Starship hasn't even reached orbit yet.
Remember when SpaceX was going to land a Starship on the moon by 2022? Or when there was going to be a Starship Mars mission launched by 2024? Neither of those has happened yet, or is even close to happening, and these timelines were never remotely realistic. And this isn't a recent phenomenon: even back in 2017, Musk was claiming that a crewed mission to Mars would be launched by 2024. And it's not just Musk who is guilty of this: NASA's announcement that it would have astronauts landing on the moon by 2024 was also never going to happen.
It costs nothing to make a big announcement, but it is a good way to drum up a lot of interest and headlines. And as for whether the thing being announced actually comes to pass — well, that's a secondary concern.
An uncrewed 2026 Starship flight to Mars could still happen though. SpaceX has proven its ability to iterate quickly and to create remarkable results with its projects like the resuable Falcon 9 rocket, the Crew Dragon capsule, and the Starlink communications network. However, there's one glaring issue about these Starship plans which isn't being addressed: sending an uncrewed spacecraft in the direction of Mars is one thing. Sending actual people to Mars, landing them safely, and setting up a long-term habitable environment there is quite another.
In its promotional material for Musk's talk, SpaceX said it would be addressing the company's 'plans for establishing a permanent human settlement and cities on Mars,' and 'how SpaceX will use the world's most powerful and capable rocket to build a human presence on the red planet over the next decade.' It also noted that, 'The next opportunity to launch from Earth to Mars opens in late 2026.'
That's rather a sleight of hand, because the window for launch might be next year (due to the orbits of Earth and Mars, the most efficient way to travel between the two, using something called a Hohmann transfer orbit, happens every 26 months) but even if (and it's a big if) a Starship is launched then, it absolutely won't have any people on board. Going from (maybe, possibility, extremely optimistically) launching an uncrewed test flight in 2026, to getting actual humans to Mars within the next 10 years? Not a chance.
That's because launching a rocket to Mars is, almost unbelievably, the easy part of a Mars mission. Landing on Mars is extremely difficult, even for a relatively small object like a rover, and it's much harder for heavy loads and when you need to meet the much higher required degree of safety to have humans on board. Even that isn't the biggest issue though.
The big issues are keeping people safe, healthy, and fed when they do arrive. You need to build a habitat and make air to breathe, find a way to collect and purify water, grow crops in poisonous soil and then, most potentially dangerous of all, successfully launch a rocket from Mars to bring people back to Earth — something that's never been done.
These problems all have potential technological solutions, but space-ready technology doesn't just appear within a few years. Knowing how to purify water on Earth, say, and being able to do it reliably using light-weight and extremely robust technology that needs to operate in a different gravitational environment with unknown environmental factors like extreme dust exposure, are two quite different things. And that's one of the easier problems to solve.
The really sticky issue for human habitation of Mars, according to experts, is human health. Between a long and grueling journey with health effects of its own, arriving on the planet will be no picnic. With its thin atmosphere, Mars is bombarded by dangerous space radiation, and currently there's no practical way of protecting astronauts from it.
If future Mars explorers want to be able to go out and explore the planet without their likelihood of developing cancer shooting through the roof, they'll need some kind of radiation protection that is portable and lightweight enough to move in, and they'll need shielding for any habitats and vehicles that they want to use as well. None of these problems have been solved yet, and they are unlikely to have solutions ready to launch in the next decade.
The SpaceX presentation is big on grand claims and flashy visuals, but short on details about how any of these objectives are going to be met. None of this is a reason not to try to go to Mars — certainly there are many excellent reasons for human exploration beyond our planet — but as any engineer should know, grand plans don't mean a thing unless there's a realistic way to make them happen.