In 2011 Elon Musk said he would put a man on Mars within 10 years. Then he claimed he would send a manned mission by 2024.
Today, he once again scaled back that ambition – promising to send a SpaceX Starship rocket containing one of his Tesla Optimus robots to the Red Planet by the end of next year.
And if that is successful, he predicts he will finally send a human to Mars by as early as 2029 – but admitted that 2031 ‘is more likely’ in a new post on X today.
In order to do that, Musk – last seen at a de facto Tesla sales event in the grounds of the White House with US President Donald Trump – will need to sort the problems haunting Starship, the world’s most powerful and theoretically re-usable rocket.
Posting on X to mark the 23rd anniversary of SpaceX’s founding in March 2002, he once again made a fresh promise as to when man might finally expect to reach Mars.
‘Starship departs for Mars at the end of next year, carrying Optimus,’ he wrote, quoting a fawning video made by another X user showing SpaceX rockets exploding during several failed launches.
‘If those landings go well, then human landings may start as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely.’
But SpaceX faced setbacks earlier this month when its latest Starship prototype exploded minutes after liftoff after the booster separated.
The Starship rocket is made up of two parts: its Super Heavy booster, designed to send the rocket into the atmosphere, and the Starship spacecraft carrying passengers or payloads.
Both are designed to be reusable, engineered to be ‘caught’ by the launch pad or splashing down into the ocean – bringing themselves gently back down to Earth with their own rocket boosters.
But eight minutes into lift-off on March 6, SpaceX’s live webcast data suggested four of the main ship’s six engines had shut down.
The upper stage rocket tumbled uncontrollably before breaking up – with burning pieces of the rocket streaking across the sky.
It was a near identical failure to one experienced in January, despite the firm making a number of changes in a bid to avoid a repeat.
‘During Starship’s ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly and contact was lost,’ the firm said, deploying its preferred parlance for a rocket exploding.
‘Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses.
‘We will review the data from today’s flight test to better understand root cause. As always, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will offer additional lessons to improve Starship’s reliability.’
The US Federal Aviation Administration launched a mishap investigation after flights at a number of Florida airports were grounded due to the risk of what SpaceX might have termed ‘rapid unscheduled falling debris’.
To date, Starship has a 50 per cent launch success rate. The project is critical to both Musk’s firm and NASA, with whom it has a contract to supply Starship to carry astronauts to the moon.
Responding to one tweet about the explosion, Musk replied: ‘Today was a minor setback. Progress is measured by time. The next ship will be ready in 4 to 6 weeks.’
He added: ‘Rockets are hard.’
Musk will also have to prove his Optimus robots can be truly autonomous. When they were unveiled at a Tesla event in October, the $30,000 machines were seen serving drinks and interacting with attendees.
But it later emerged the robots were not acting on their own – instead being remote controlled by a human elsewhere in the venue.
