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If you want to go to Mars, timing is everything, and Elon Musk no longer believes his company SpaceX will hit the red planet when the next window of opportunity opens in 2022.
The world’s leading fan of leaving this world had previously hoped to send a robotic mission to Mars in 2022, followed by a crewed trip a couple of years later. During an interview at the Mars Society virtual convention on Friday, Musk said he now believes his next-generation Starship spacecraft could be ready in 2023, in time for a launch window in 2024.
The orbits of Earth and Mars around the sun bring the two planets closer to each other approximately every two years. That’s why we saw three robotic missions to our neighboring world, including NASA’s Perseverance rover, launch weeks apart in July.
“I think we have a fighting chance,” Musk said of the 2024 Mars shuttle window.
However, to get there, Musk says his team will need to accelerate its pace of innovation and that he’s not afraid to break a few things along the way.
“We will probably lose a few ships,” he said when asked about the development process for Starship, which is designed to eventually get dozens of people to Mars at once.
So far, the first Starship prototypes have made short low-altitude “jumps” from SpaceX’s test facility in Texas. Musk expects the first models to reach orbit for the first time next year. He added that the company could demonstrate in-orbit refueling capability in 2022 and begin making trips to the moon soon after.
The company’s founder and chief engineer cautioned that he has no secret dates to achieve these milestones.
“These are just guesswork,” Musk told Mars Society president Robert Zubrin about Zoom.
See this:
SpaceX Starship prototype makes first ‘leap’
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As for who will go to Mars, Musk said that once there are a million people who want to go to the red planet and can afford it, that should be enough to sustain a city. So, in other words, it seems that the first Martians were probably wealthy Earthlings.
Once on Mars, Musk said, the first order of business will be to set up a power plant. He also mentioned the idea of sending robotic droids to the surface that people could control remotely from Earth.
Naturally, Musk also has designs on more than Mars. He mentioned the idea of using Starship or another ship to visit the suddenly exciting atmosphere of Venus, large asteroids, the moons of Jupiter and even the Kuiper belt and the farthest places in the solar system.
“We need to make the leap of going to another planet first,” he said.
