Elon Musk reveals timeline to colonize Mars

Elon Musk has announced that SpaceX plans to launch its first missions to Mars aboard the Starship rocket in 2026. Furthermore, Musk has also said that he would be creating a city on planet Mars, named Terminus.

The timing of Musk's ambitious testing will align with the next Earth-Mars transfer window, which only occurs once every 26 months.

The first flight will be uncrewed to test Starship’s landing capabilities and ensure crew safety once humans are abroad.

If the initial testing goes well, then we can expect the first crewed flights to Mars to be in the next four years. The ultimate goal will be to build a self-sustaining city on Mars in 20 years.

This seemingly urgent timelines for the missions may be affected by Musk’s continuing insistence that lower birthrates are among the greatest threats to our species.

Musk once tweeted:

Being Multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet.

Musk announces plans following news from China

The announcement comes on the heels of China's decision to accelerate its own Mars exploration plans. China just recently announced that the country’s Tianwen-3 mission could be carried out as soon as 2028.

SpaceX's ambitious timeline hinges on the successful development of its Starship rocket. Designed to carry up to 100 people on interplanetary journeys, Starship has undergone two orbital flight tests in 2024, both of which ended in controlled explosions upon landing.

"The initial Starship missions to Mars will be uncrewed to assess the reliability of landing on the Red Planet," Musk explained. "If these missions are successful, we'll aim for crewed flights within four years. Our goal is to establish a self-sustaining city on Mars within two decades."

Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, measures approximately 120 meters tall. Designed for reusability, the massive booster rocket is intended to return to its launch tower after delivering the upper stage to orbit. Musk hopes to build a fleet of hundreds of Starships to transport people and cargo throughout the solar system.

The billionaire's ultimate vision is to establish a self-sustaining colony on Mars by 2050, realizing his ambition of making humanity a multi-planetary species.

Colonising Mars

Musk previously announced that the first city on Mars will be named Terminus, which means final in Latin. There is a poetic meaning behind this name, because it signifies the end of Earth’s exclusive claim to human civilization and the beginning of something grander- a multiplanetary species. In other words this could be a new beginning for the human race outside of planet Earth.

But living on Mars won't be easy, given the difference in temperature, gravity, atmospheric pressure etc.

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All these details would have to be sorted out by Musk and his team before he can start sending humans up to Mars.

Leveraging on blockchain technologies to overcome logistics handling

Musk’s post mentioned in a post that his target behind all this is to build a functional human city within the next 20 years. But he sees various obstacles that would stand between him and his mission, largely economics and technology.

Musk tweeted:

“It currently costs about a billion dollars per ton of useful payload to the surface of Mars. That needs to be improved to $100k/ton to build a self-sustaining city there, so the technology needs to be 10,000 times better. This is extremely difficult, but not impossible.”

The creation of such a massive increase in efficiency in such a short period of time could require a radical restructuring of how space-based logistics and communications are handled.

NASA researchers found that using blockchain technology to orchestrate, execute, and verify communications between satellites may be the most efficient and future facing methods for advancing space based logistics handling.

Musk’s SpaceX is in the best position on Earth when it comes to the potential for implementing blockchain technology within a cluster of satellites and/or spacecraft.

Reports have shown that SpaceX has 6,370 active STarlink satellites in low-Earth orbit. This means that the company controls more than 62% of all active satellites.

A little too good to be true

Many are commenting that Musk’s ambition to build the next self-sustaining city on Mars in the next 20 years to be a little too ambitious. While Musk’s plan might seem like a page torn out of the science fiction book, there seems to be too much uncertainty that would lead to the ultimate success of his ultimate plan. Given all the logistical and practical barriers behind his mission, I think it would take at least a few more decades for us to really see a self-sustaining city on Mars. What about you, what do you think?