On March 17, SpaceX CEO Musk said in response to questions from others on Twitter that humans will land on Mars in 2029.
Late last year, Musk was asked the same question in an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, and Musk said that "the fastest is about 5 years, the slowest is 10 years", which should be Musk's more rigorous answer.
Musk said they had such a plan 5 years ago, which would build 1,000 Starship rockets, launch 3 a day, and eventually send 1 million humans to Mars. Musk introduced that the most critical factor in sending people to Mars depends on the "rocket project", Starship is the most complex and advanced rocket ever built, and it is still being optimized to reduce launch costs.
SpaceX is currently the most promising private space company, and its starship spacecraft has been able to carry out deep interstellar travel, and the sailing distance can be farther than the International Space Station. It also plans to return humans to the moon in 2025, especially to the south pole of the moon, the first manned mission to the moon since Apollo 17 ( the last lunar flight of the Apollo program ) in 1972.
On the surface, SpaceX's development is very smooth, but in fact, there are many hidden crises. The raptor engine production crisis is severe, and if SpaceX does not achieve the Frequency of Starship flights at least once every two weeks this year, they will face a serious bankruptcy crisis.
Not only do starships need "Raptor", but the mass and volume of the second-generation Starlink satellites have been improved, which also needs to be launched with "Raptor". The status of the engine is too important, if its mass production problem is not solved, it will greatly affect the starship and starlink projects, not only the existing projects may have to pay liquidated damages, but also have a serious impact on the future project undertaking.
In addition to SpaceX, Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, and Virgin Galactic, founded by Branson, also launched a commercial footprint for space travel last year and sent people into space several times. In Musk's eyes, he despised Blue Origin's space capabilities, and even mocked Bezos for just touching the edge of space.
But the two companies do split some of the star travel revenue, and SpaceX must keep reducing costs so that it can continuously improve gross margins to earn more money to go to Mars.