Musk says SpaceX could land on Mars in up to 4 years – 10/06/2023 – Science

Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, has said the company could land a spacecraft on Mars within three to four years.

The possibility was mentioned by Musk during his participation via video conference, this Thursday (5), at the International Astronautical Congress in Azerbaijan. He also gave information about the progress of Starship, a rocket that SpaceX is developing.

“I think it’s a viable thing in the next four years to do an unmanned landing test there,” Musk told Clay Mowry, president of the International Astronautical Federation, in an hour-long question-and-answer session.

Musk and SpaceX have an impressive track record of notable achievements in spaceflight. This includes the routine landing and reuse of the booster stages of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets — the company has already launched 70 times this year alone.

However, Musk also has another track record: taking much longer than expected to achieve his goals.

First, he revealed his rocket to go to Mars. Then an even larger rocket called the Interplanetary Transport System, at an International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2016. He predicted that SpaceX’s first unmanned landing on the red planet would occur in 2022, followed by the first flight with people on board in 2024.

So far, there has been a single Starship test flight, in April this year. The spacecraft took off, however, control of the vehicle was lost and an order was given to detonate it minutes after the flight.

A second Starship is ready, Musk said. But SpaceX is still awaiting the issuance of a new launch license by the American Federal Aviation Agency (FAA), possibly later this month.

This Thursday, Musk described some of the changes to Starship’s design. In the second flight, the second stage engines will be activated before separating from the propellant. The maneuver, known as “hot staging”, can be complicated.

“You’re basically blowing up the top part of the booster” with the second stage engines, Musk said. “This is actually, from a physics perspective, the most efficient way.”

He is no longer predicting putting humans on Mars in 2024, but he has other technologically ambitious predictions for Starship next year. For a rapid sequence of launches, SpaceX plans for the rocket’s Super Heavy booster to not only return to the launch site, but also float above the ground while two arms on the launch tower capture it mid-air. The same maneuver would be used for Starship’s upper stage when it returns from orbit.

Musk said there is “a reasonable chance” of capturing a booster within the next year and possibly a Starship from orbit before the end of next year.

It also stated that SpaceX’s next generation of Starlink satellites could begin launching next year on expendable versions of the Starship stage that are not reused.

When will Starship land NASA astronauts on the Moon?

The conversation between Mowry and Musk only briefly touched on SpaceX’s key role in NASA’s Artemis program to send astronauts back to the Moon. A version of Starship will carry two astronauts from the American agency to land in the satellite’s south polar region during Artemis 3 mission.

“You’re doing a moon landing version, right?” Mowry asked.

Musk acknowledged this, but shifted focus to say that what SpaceX was building for NASA would include only minor modifications to a spacecraft designed to land on Mars.

The Artemis 3 mission is scheduled for the end of 2025, but NASA members have already indicated that this date will probably be postponed to 2026, at least.

A few months ago, James Free, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration systems development, said NASA had received an updated timeline for Starship development and was reviewing it.

Without specifically mentioning SpaceX, Free said in August that if all the technological pieces were not in place for a Moon landing, “we could end up doing a different mission.”