Within two years the first unmanned spaceships on Mars. If all goes well, astronauts will climb aboard in 4 years and in 20 years we should see the first cities destined to accommodate human colonies. Elon Musk confirms one of his most visionary intentions in a couple of posts on X: going to the red planet. Musk, who in the meantime is well on his way to becoming the world’s first trillionaire by 2027explains that «the first spaceships destined for Mars will be launched in 2 years, when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens».
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They will initially be unmanned to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, the first manned flights to Mars will occur in 4 years. In his vision, “the flight rate will grow exponentially, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years.” He explains, “we will need to be multi-planetary, since we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet.” “SpaceX,” he adds, “has created the first rocket stage that is completely reusable, and more importantly, has made reuse economically viable. Making life multiplanetary is fundamentally a cost-per-ton problem on Mars. It currently costs about $1 billion per ton of payload on the surface of Mars. That needs to be improved to $100,000/ton to build a self-sustaining city there, so the technology needs to be 10,000 times better. Extremely difficult, but not impossible.”
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The space race also sees Jeff Bezos in the challenge between billionaires, who a few days ago announced the inaugural flight of the new reusable rocket for heavy loads for October Blue Origin’s New Glenn, a direct competitor to SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and Starship rockets. SpaceX’s Starship (for which tests continue), will instead be used in a modified version to land the first astronauts on the Moon during the Artemis 3 mission, scheduled for September 2026. Musk does not seem to lack resources for the moment. According to a report by Informa Connect Academy, the wealth of the Tesla, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter) boss has grown at an average annual rate of 110%, a condition that would put him at the top of the rankings of the richest in the world, conquering, even before Mars, the title of trillionaire for next year.
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