Artist’s conception of a Martian colony, with SpaceX Starship rockets in the background. Image: SpaceX
In a recent interview, Elon Musk repeated his stated goal of wanting to transport one million people to Mars by 2050. The SpaceX founder says the future of humanity is at stake, which, okay, but the timeline he offers is ludicrous, and here’s why.
Before we plunge into this, I need to make it crystal clear that many of the challenges addressed in this article are not insurmountable. Technological feasibility is not my gripe, nor do I take issue with the desire to colonize the Red Planet, though, as I’ve written before, the colonization of Mars will necessitate the transformation of the human species as we know it.
That the fourth planet from the Sun may host bustling cities at some point in the distant future is possible. My issue with all of this has to do with the stupendously unreasonable timelines under which Musk believes this will happen. In an April 2022 interview with TED curator Chris Anderson, the billionaire rehashed his plan to send one million colonists to Mars by 2050, and he did so while maintaining a remarkably straight face.
A man with a plan
Speaking to a seemingly credulous Anderson, Musk spoke of a herculean Battlestar Galactica-like effort to transport thousands of colonists to Mars with a thousand SpaceX Starship rockets. Musk’s vision remains aligned with a series of tweets from 2020, in which he articulated a plan to build 100 Starships each year over a 10-year period.
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Departing in batches, each Starship would leave for Mars during key 30-day windows that open once every 26 months (the launch interval is to take advantage of the Earth-Mars alignment, when the two planets are closest to each other). Should launches begin in 2028, and assuming this intense launch cadence can be realized, Musk figures the Martian city of his dreams, with its million inhabitants, could come to fruition in just 22 years.
For Musk, the lofty figure of one million isn’t just a goal or a prediction—it’s a necessary requirement for sustaining a colony on Mars. The “critical threshold,” he told Anderson, “is if the ships from Earth stop coming for any reason,” which could decide the fate of the Martian colony and ultimately of humanity itself. Musk is claiming a philanthropic motive, saying our inability to colonize Mars and transition to an interplanetary species could serve as a filter that ultimately results in our doom. As he told Anderson, “I think this is important for maximizing the probable lifespan of humanity or consciousness,” but the “probable lifespan of civilizational consciousness as we know it” is like a “small candle in the vast darkness” of the universe—a “delicate” candle that “could just go out.”
Conceptual image of a Starship spacecraft arriving at Mars. Image: SpaceX
But as Musk also told Anderson, life on Mars, “especially in the beginning, will not be luxurious.” Rather, it will be “dangerous, cramped, difficult, hard work,” and “you might not make it back,” he said, adding: “But it’ll be glorious.”
Glorious for Elon Musk, maybe, but certainly not for the colonists relegated to eking out an existence in a supremely hostile and unaccommodating world. Well, assuming they ever get there. The SpaceX CEO told Anderson that “almost anyone can work and save up and eventually have $100,000 and be able to go to Mars if they want,” in reference to the hypothesized cost of each journey. Alternatively, prospective Martians could procure funding from government sponsors or by taking out a loan, Musk said.
It’s as if Musk and NASA inhabit two different realities. And it’s not as if the truth lies somewhere in between. Someone is not just wrong; someone is catastrophically wrong, and that someone is Elon Musk.
Musk, I would argue, is getting way ahead of himself. NASA, by comparison, is hoping to land the first humans on Mars by the late 2030s or early 2040s. A modest human presence would follow, but very slowly and cautiously, with pioneering explorers, scientists, and possibly even some colonists, taking their first tentative baby steps on this hostile, alien world in the years and decades to follow.
These disparate visions of how and when Mars might get colonized are completely out of alignment. It’s as if Musk and NASA inhabit two different realities. And it’s not as if the truth lies somewhere in between. Someone is not just wrong; someone is catastrophically wrong, and that someone is Elon Musk.
Predicated on vaporware
Back-of-the-envelope calculations are fun, but they can lead to erroneous and over-simplified conclusions. A necessary reality check suggests it’s going to take significant time and effort for SpaceX to develop, test, and certify Starship and then build these megarockets in the quantities Musk desires.
Conceptual view of a SpaceX Starship rocket blasting off. Image: SpaceX
To be clear, the fully integrated Starship has not yet reached space. I’m confident SpaceX will eventually have its jumbo rocket, but the heavy launcher, a key element of Musk’s Martian plans, doesn’t yet exist. The current plan is to send a fully integrated, uncrewed Starship on a super-quick orbital spaceflight later this year, but further testing and refinements will be required before the vehicle can be put to functional use.
Importantly, Starship is meant to be reusable, requiring SpaceX to develop an unprecedented “Mechazilla” tower that will somehow catch the rocket during vertical descent and landing. Nothing like this has ever been done, and it could take some time to develop.
Musk is also having to contend with regulators; the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are concerned about potential environmental damage at the SpaceX launch site in south Texas. As of this writing, SpaceX has not received FAA approval to launch the two-stage Starship at the Boca Chica facility.
Once Starship becomes an actual thing, SpaceX will then have to contend with the daunting challenge of building these rockets en masse. Musk’s hand-waving proclamation that 100 Starships will be built each year is truly ambitious, but I’ll believe it when I see it. The company isn’t currently able to produce its Raptor engines at the pace required to sustain operations. Late last year, Musk said this “Raptor production crisis” threatens a “genuine risk of bankruptcy” if SpaceX cannot launch a Starship rocket once every two weeks. Yet we’re supposed to believe that, in around six years or so, SpaceX will have solved its engine production problems and somehow figured out a way to manufacture Starships in vast quantities—a logistical challenge that will require the steady flow of human labor, materials, propellants, and everything else that will make up this future rocket.
We’re only human
Should SpaceX be capable of transporting so many people to Mars across such a short time frame, there will still exist a tremendous number of challenges to overcome. First and foremost, there’s the human factor to consider. Very simply, our meat suits are not built for space or hostile alien worlds. The Red Planet, with its achingly thin atmosphere, cold temperatures, and non-existent magnetosphere, offers no oxygen to breathe, no water at the surface, and no protection from deadly ionizing radiation.
Conceptual image showing humans on the Martian surface. Image: SpaceX
“Fulfilling Elon Musk’s dream of establishing a self-sustaining colony on Mars entails risks that are far beyond those of sending a small group of humans on a round-trip mission to that planet,” Thomas Lang, a professor at the UCSF Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging in San Francisco, explained to me. “The risks of a relatively small Mars mission, which might comprise six-month transits to and from the destination and 18-month sojourns on the surface, are already daunting.”
These challenges, he said, include the maintaining of human physiology at the functional level, protecting colonists from radiation, and dealing with the effects of extreme isolation. Space agencies around the world are currently investigating these risks, and Lang believes we’ll eventually find ways to overcome them.
But even if these risks can be addressed, “establishing a one-million-person colony on Mars” still represents “a leap into the unknown, both in terms of engineering and social evolution,” Lang said. Private firms like SpaceX, and also government agencies, “could eventually build the spacecraft and several of the different supporting technologies like habitats, power generation, and transport,” he said, but those challenges “would be small compared to the challenge of figuring out how to ‘live off the land,’ extracting from Mars the resources needed to support this population.” And if some solutions were to emerge for the on-site production of resources during initial Martian missions, it’s “not clear that it could be successfully scaled up to support a large population,” Lang added.
Barely meeting the bare necessities of life
Jill Sohm, director of the Environment Studies Program at the University of Southern California, thinks of the problem in terms of basic human needs. Humans can “go a few minutes without breathing, a few days without drinking, and a few weeks without eating, so oxygen, water, and food are the bare necessities,” she told me. “Without these, we could not survive, let alone thrive.”
Altering the atmosphere of Mars such that air is breathable within a few decades is clearly not possible. This means colonists will need to live in enclosed environments and have “efficient recycling systems to remove carbon dioxide and generate…