The chances of humanity setting foot on Mars before the end of the decade are starting to fade. Elon Musk's predictions about the human target reaching the Red Planet, in fact backwards.
In 2016, the SpaceX founder revealed his big ambition to build a city on Mars. At the time, Musk hoped to witness a crewed mission to Mars as soon as 2024. Since then, SpaceX has made a lot of progress in building its Mars rocket. But apparently, all these efforts are not fast enough to meet the target.
On Wednesday (16/3), Musk took to Twitter, replying to a tweet from the Twitter account @SpaceHub_SL, saying that he now predicts 2029 as a more likely year for humans to set foot on Mars for the first time. This year marks 60 years since the first human landing on the Moon in 1969.
What's your guess @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/IbcVgjAYJw
— Space_Hub (@SpaceHub_SL) March 14, 2022
The Starship probe, designed by SpaceX to take NASA astronauts to the Moon and eventually to Mars, has made several successful high-altitude flights, but has not yet made it to space.
Musk has for the past two years made a fuss about federal launch regulations slowing down the process of getting to Mars. He even recently raised the issue of bankruptcy if SpaceX couldn't produce Starship's raptor engines sooner.
Not surprisingly, getting to Mars requires planning. As Mars and Earth move around the Sun, the two planets move closer to each other and then away again.
To take advantage of the moments of travel between the two shortest planetary distances requires launching over a period of time. The ideal Mars launch periods for this decade would be late this year, late 2024, late 2026, and late 2028 or early 2029.
It seems that Musk's initial ambitions may have been overly optimistic. If the target date were to slip further into the 2030s, this would be the same as NASA's estimate of sending the first astronauts to Mars.