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Digital Trends
5 days ago
- Politics
- Digital Trends
SpaceX wants to send humans to Mars by 2028, here's why it won't
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. Recommended Videos 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.
News.com.au
28-05-2025
- General
- News.com.au
SpaceX starship spins out of control following launch
A SpaceX starship has spun out of control shortly after launching. The ninth full test mission of the Starship rocket system was sent into space from Texas. The 122-meter vessel began spiralling 30 minutes into the mission after it flew further than the previous two attempts.
Asharq Al-Awsat
28-05-2025
- Business
- Asharq Al-Awsat
Starship Spins Out of Control after Flying Past Points of Previous Failures
SpaceX's Starship rocket roared into space from Texas on Tuesday but spun out of control about halfway through its flight without achieving some of its most important testing goals, bringing fresh engineering hurdles to CEO Elon Musk's increasingly turbulent Mars rocket program. The 400-foot tall (122 meter) Starship rocket system, the core of Musk's goal of sending humans to Mars, lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase, Texas, launch site, flying beyond the point of two previous explosive attempts earlier this year that sent debris streaking over Caribbean islands and forced dozens of airliners to divert course. For the latest launch, the ninth full test mission of Starship since the first attempt in April 2023, the upper-stage cruise vessel was lofted to space atop a previously flown booster - a first such demonstration of the booster's reusability. But SpaceX lost contact with the 232-foot lower-stage booster during its descent before it plunged into the sea, rather than making the controlled splashdown the company had planned, Reuters reported. Starship, meanwhile, continued into suborbital space but began to spin uncontrollably roughly 30 minutes into the mission. The errant spiraling came after SpaceX canceled a plan to deploy eight mock Starlink satellites into space - the rocket's "Pez" candy dispenser-like mechanism failed to work as designed. "Not looking great with a lot of our on-orbit objectives for today," SpaceX broadcaster Dan Huot said on a company livestream. Musk was scheduled to deliver an update on his space exploration ambitions in a speech from Starbase following the test flight, billed as a livestream presentation about "The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary." Hours later, he had yet to give the speech and there was no sign that he intended to do so. In a post on X, Musk touted Starship's scheduled shutdown of an engine in space, a step previous test flights achieved last year. He said a leak on Starship's primary fuel tank led to its loss of control. "Lot of good data to review," he said. "Launch cadence for next 3 flights will be faster, at approximately 1 every 3 to 4 weeks." SpaceX has said the Starship models that have flown this year bear significant design upgrades from previous prototypes, as thousands of company employees work to build a multi-purpose rocket capable of putting massive batches of satellites in space, carrying humans back to the moon and ultimately ferrying astronauts to Mars. The last two test flights - in January and March - were cut short moments after liftoff as the vehicles blew to pieces on ascent, raining debris over parts of the Caribbean and disrupting scores of commercial airline flights in the region. The Federal Aviation Administration expanded debris hazard zones around the ascent path for Tuesday's launch. The previous back-to-back failures occurred in early test-flight phases that SpaceX had easily achieved before, in a striking setback to a program that Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who founded the rocket company in 2002, had sought to accelerate this year. Musk, the world's wealthiest individual and a key supporter of US President Donald Trump, was especially eager for a success after vowing in recent days to refocus his attention on his various business ventures, including SpaceX, following a tumultuous foray into national politics and his attempts at cutting government bureaucracy. Closer to home, Musk also sees Starship as eventually replacing the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as the workhorse in the company's commercial launch business, which already lofts most of the world's satellites and other payloads to low-Earth orbit.
News.com.au
28-05-2025
- General
- News.com.au
Watch: SpaceX's Massive Starship Rocket Blasts Off in Ninth Flight Test
For the first time, SpaceX launched a previously used Super Heavy booster for its ninth test flight of Starship. The booster was previously used on Starship's seventh flight test.
Scottish Sun
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
The 1% Club wipes out 10 players on tricky cat picture question – but could you work it out in 30 seconds?
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) THE 1% Club has wiped out 10 players on a tricky cat picture question - but could you work it out in 30 seconds? Lee Mack, 56, took to the ITV airwaves once again to present another edition of the smash-hit gameshow. 3 The 1% Club left players feeling stumped with a tricky cat question Credit: Not known, clear with picture desk 3 Lee Mack hosts the fan favourite ITV quiz show Credit: Not known, clear with picture desk The 1% Club is a unique format that doesn't test players on their general knowledge like other shows. Instead, it tests them on their logic, reasoning skills and common sense. 100 players are whittled down, question by question, as they are tasked with solving different riddles. They aim to get to the last round where only one percent of the public could answer the final question correctly. In one episode, Lee showed the contestants an image of a cat and asked: "Which is the correct picture of the cat once it has been rotated 180 degrees?" After the contestants had 30 seconds to come up with the answer, Lee revealed that a whopping 10 players had been knocked out. He then explained: " That if you rotate the image 180 degrees it would look like choice A." However, that's not the only time questions involving images have stumped players. In the latest edition of the show, Lee showed the contestants three images that appeared to be a rope, a rocket and some test tubes. He then asked them: "What common three word phrase is represented here?" Common phrase picture question stumps The 1% Club players As the contestants put their thinking caps on, he quipped: "Looks like a selection of ways my wife has thought to get rid of me." He then revealed that four people had been knocked out and went on to reveal the answer. "Not Rocket Science," he explained. He then spoke to Daisy, a contestant who used her pass during the round - because she didn't know the answer. Daisy explained: "I saw it just after the time as well, but yeah I couldn't put it together in that time." "Are you a competitive person?" he asked her. "Yeah, straight out of Uni all my friends were signing up to climb Kilimanjaro and I was like yeah that sounds like a great idea." "Did you do it?" asked Lee. "Yeah, I was the only one that got to the top, as well, cos I got that bad altitude sickness, I didn't know where I was." "Well, listen well done Daisy, You're still with us," replied Lee before he went onto the next question. 3 Lee revealed the answer after a whopping 10 players were knocked out Credit: Not known, clear with picture desk The 1% Club airs on Saturday evenings on ITV and ITVX.
