Last year, SpaceX installed a neon sign at Starbase that read “Gateway to Mars.” Elon Musk founded the company in 2002 with money from the sale of PayPal and the desire to colonize the red planet. SpaceX has achieved incredible things since then, but its most optimistic plan will require at least a thousand spacecraft and another 20 years of work, according to Musk himself.
Before founding SpaceX, Elon Musk briefly served on the board of directors of the Mars Society, a nonprofit organization that promotes human conquest of Mars. It was at a conference that he announced a project called Mars Oasis, which aimed to install a small greenhouse on the Red Planet to revive public interest in Martian exploration.
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Elon Musk is ambitious, and the idea of growing plants on Mars eventually evolved into something much more complex: making humanity a multi-planetary species capable of surviving a catastrophe on Earth. Or, more pragmatically, create the architecture necessary to establish a self-sustaining human colony on Mars. He must have said to himself: “Wait a minute, I could build my own rockets to go to Mars“, because 20 years later, that's exactly what he's doing with Starship.
A thousand ships to colonize Mars
Although its name and design have changed over the years, the long-term plan for the Starship program remains the same:
– A huge rocket, fully and quickly reusable, capable of launching more than 100 tons into space at minimal cost.
– A fleet of these rockets, financed by public and private funds, which can transport dozens of people to the red planet to build a manned base there.
– Thousands of these rockets flying to Mars every time the planets align to build a self-sufficient city of a million people there.
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In addition to being ambitious, Elon Musk is optimistic. In 2019, the tycoon estimated that it would take 1,000 spaceships and 20 years of launches to build a sustainable city on the red planet.
He also estimated the cost of each launch at $2 millionan absurdly low amount by industry standards. Launching a Falcon Heavy, the most powerful rocket in service, costs 50 times more.
In 2020, Musk made further calculations. Starship's goal is to fly three times a day, a thousand times a year, launching one megaton per year into space for ten Starships. “If we build 100 ships per year, we will have 1,000 in 10 years, or 100 megatons per year“, he declared, before adding: “About 100,000 people per Earth-Mars orbital synchronization“.
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Launch windows to Mars open every 26 months to take advantage of its closer proximity to Earth. Musk thinks that if launches began in 2028, a Martian city of one million inhabitants could emerge just 22 years later, in 2050.
This is an extremely optimistic view of what a company like SpaceX can do in such a short time frame, but there is one thing that cannot be denied about Elon Musk: his goal is the same since he founded SpaceX. The company is now worth $180 billion and the ship exists, we've seen it reach space.
Article written in collaboration with our colleagues from Xataka.
