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SpaceX’s first manned mission to Mars could be in just four years.
Founder and CEO of the company Elon musk said on Tuesday (December 1) that he was “very confident” that SpaceX will launch people to the Red Planet in 2026, adding that the milestone could come as early as 2024 “if we’re lucky.”
Musk made the remarks during a web interview with Mathias Döpfner, CEO of German media company Axel Springer SE. The two spoke at Axel Springer’s headquarters in Berlin as part of a ceremony honoring Musk, which this year won Axel Springer Award.
“And then we want to try to send an unequipped vehicle over there in two years,” Musk told Döpfner. (The two-year target intervals are dictated by orbital dynamics: Earth and March favorably align for interplanetary launches once every 26 months.)
Related: Starship and Super Heavy: the vehicles colonizing SpaceX’s Mars in pictures
The vehicle that will make these trips to Mars is the 50-meter-high Starship, which will be launched from Earth atop a giant rocket known as the Super Heavy. These two boats will be fully and quickly reusable; Super Heavy will return to Earth for vertical landings shortly after takeoff, and Starship will be able to fly from Earth orbit to Mars and return multiple times, Musk said. (The spacecraft will be powerful enough to launch into both Mars and the moon, which have much weaker gravitational pulls than Earth.)
SpaceX is iterating to the final ship via a series of prototypes, the latest of which, SN8 (“Serial No. 8”), is gearing up for a major test flight. SpaceX aims to launch the three-engine SN8 to a target altitude of 15 kilometers this week, Musk said recently.
It’s much higher than any other Starship prototype has flown to date. Three single-engine variants – Starhopper, SN5 and SN6 – reached a maximum altitude of around 150 meters during their test flights, which took place last summer and last August and September, respectively.
The final starship will be fitted with six of SpaceX’s powerful new Raptor engines, Musk said. Super Heavy will carry around 30 Raptors.
Musk has long pointed out that he founded SpaceX in 2002 primarily to help humanity to become a multiplanet species. He reiterated this goal during his conversation with Döpfner and also doubled down on another previously stated desire: He wants to die on Mars.
“But not on the impact,” Musk joked.
Tuesday’s discussion was very broad, touching a number of Musk’s businesses and passions. For example, Musk expressed confidence that his electric car company, Tesla, will introduce fully autonomous driving capability next year (although he stressed that it is not clear when regulators will approve. fully autonomous driving).
The annual Axel Springer Prize “is awarded to outstanding personalities who are particularly innovative, who generate and change markets, influence culture and at the same time take responsibility for society”, wrote the representatives of the company in a description of the price. It is a “prestige prize without cash prize”, adds the description.
Previous Axel Springer Award winners include Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who also heads the spaceflight company. Blue origin (2018), World Wide Web inventor Timothy Berners-Lee (2017) and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (2016).
Mike Wall is the author of “Over there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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