I would say it's doubtful, but betting against Elon Musk has proven to be a
pretty foolish thing to do. The thing is, it doesn't seem to be Musk's
idea,
it seems to be President Trump's.
Let me back up a little.
Like every other government agency, NASA is in the throws of changes from
President Trump's first weeks in office, along with Musk's department,
DOGE.
The NASA folks are a bit rattled by it all. Jared Isaacman,
Trump's pick to lead the organization, hasn't been confirmed yet, and hearings are currently anticipated to be in the
second half of February. In the meantime, an interim administrator named
Janet Petro was appointed, and like every other agency, has passed on the
Executive Orders to remove diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility
contracts and to "report" on anyone who did not carry out this order. As
I'd expect, there are people in NASA upset by that like every other agency we
read about.
Isaacman's approval taking until nearly March seems to be more an issue of the
large numbers that congress is having to approve and not a sign of likely
disapproval. In his last five years of funding orbital missions,
Isaacman seemed to have come to be regarded as an earnest individual,
genuinely interested in spaceflight and in advancing exploration for
all. He is seen as the kind of young, dynamic, pro-space leader with the
potential to usher NASA into the 21st century and out of the Apollo era it has
been stuck in for decades. Most importantly, the idea of reaching Mars
by 2029 is not his idea.
January of '29 also happens to be the last days of Trump's term and many
speculate that's why he talks of "men on Mars by the end of this decade." At
this point, I find it hard to imagine the Artemis program will be successful
in getting astronauts to the moon by 2030 and putting people on Mars is orders
of magnitude harder.
Artemis still depends on the
horrific SLS, the
Gateway station in a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit
near the moon and more. It also depends a lot on Starship, and the
setback of losing the Starship on Flight Test 7 impacts this schedule when the
required numbers of Starship flights are seen.
Going to Mars puts enormous demands on Starship. There's going to be a
need to launch numbers of Starships unlike anything ever launched
before. In a posting on X, Musk said, "Mass to orbit is the key metric,
thereafter mass to Mars surface. The former needs to be in the
megaton to orbit per year range to build a self-sustaining colony on
Mars." A megaton to orbit? The current Starship is the highest
capacity ever built and the largest Version 3 Starship proposed carries 200
tons to LEO. Musk calculates that he would have to achieve
5,000 Starships launches of this size per year to support a Mars
colony. That's on the order of 14 Starship launches per day. You
think near Earth orbit is crowded now?
All that Musk has said that
I can find
is that he plans to start launching unmanned Starships to Mars in the next
launch window (optimum planetary alignment) in 2026, and, if that goes well,
perhaps manned flights by 2028/29.
As hard as 5000 Starship launches a year sounds, there are still many problems
out there. Many of them are related to the "couple of months every two
years" launch windows and the problems of being in space that long for a
crew. Crews will be exposed to more radiation from the sun and deep
space than any other crew ever has been, and it doesn't get much better than
that once they're on Mars. The planet's lack of a protective atmosphere
and magnetic field creates that. A nuclear engine that could get them to
Mars in a very short order and reduced the dependence on those tiny launch
windows would help exposure during flight but not on the planet.
Final words to the summary on Space.com
Generally, as laid out by Bob Zubrin in the last century, a Mars Direct
approach would begin with successfully landing many uncrewed cargo ships in
the same location on Mars with supplies including construction materials,
consumables, mining & drilling equipment, electrochemical reactors for
production of methane and oxygen, tankage, and the components of a nuclear
power plant. Much of this would have to be done 2 years before the first
humans were launched.
Actually, in theory, all of this could be done over decades, but 2029 is
wildly unlikely, even for a one way, one astronaut suicide mission to plant
a flag.
SpaceX first released this artist's conception of a settlement on Mars some
years ago. It shows a domed city surrounded by photovoltaic farms and
four Starships. Image credit: SpaceX I'd love to live long enough to see it, but seriously doubt that's possible.