Musk: First unmanned Mars Starship targeting a ’26 launch
According to a tweet yesterday by Elon Musk, SpaceX is aiming for a 2026 launch of its first unmanned Starship to Mars.
The first Starships to Mars will launch in 2 years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens. These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years.
Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years.
The graphic to the right indicates the planned landing zone, with the four red dots the four prime locations. Three of the four are very flat, though they also appear to have a lot of very near-surface ice, accessible simply by digging a shovel into the ground. Attempting to land at any will definitely test Statship’s ability to land on Mars intact. A global map of Mars is shown below, showing the location of this landing zone. The map shows where researchers believe the saltiest water on Mars would be. According to this data, in the Starship landing zone some of that near-surface ice will turn to liquid brine a little less than one percent of each year. Otherwise it will be more easily processed for drinking and fuel.
As always with these ambitious predictions, Musk is aiming high, with the likelihood that this first mission will not make that ’26 date. At the same time, he is making it very clear that a first attempt will certainly happen by ’28.
I also think the timing of this announcement is intriguing, coming one day after NASA was forced to cancel the launch in October of two Mars orbiters because it could not be certain Blue Origin would have the New Glenn rocket ready on time. Musk’s response is to say that SpaceX is now about to begin regularly privately funded and privately built missions to Mars, on a schedule, essentially asking: “Which company would you choose to do things in space?”
Click for full unannotated image.
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Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuses to recognize this reality.
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According to a tweet yesterday by Elon Musk, SpaceX is aiming for a 2026 launch of its first unmanned Starship to Mars.
The first Starships to Mars will launch in 2 years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens. These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years.
Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years.
The graphic to the right indicates the planned landing zone, with the four red dots the four prime locations. Three of the four are very flat, though they also appear to have a lot of very near-surface ice, accessible simply by digging a shovel into the ground. Attempting to land at any will definitely test Statship’s ability to land on Mars intact. A global map of Mars is shown below, showing the location of this landing zone. The map shows where researchers believe the saltiest water on Mars would be. According to this data, in the Starship landing zone some of that near-surface ice will turn to liquid brine a little less than one percent of each year. Otherwise it will be more easily processed for drinking and fuel.
As always with these ambitious predictions, Musk is aiming high, with the likelihood that this first mission will not make that ’26 date. At the same time, he is making it very clear that a first attempt will certainly happen by ’28.
I also think the timing of this announcement is intriguing, coming one day after NASA was forced to cancel the launch in October of two Mars orbiters because it could not be certain Blue Origin would have the New Glenn rocket ready on time. Musk’s response is to say that SpaceX is now about to begin regularly privately funded and privately built missions to Mars, on a schedule, essentially asking: “Which company would you choose to do things in space?”
Click for full unannotated image.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in the past two weeks has the mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuses to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
Question:
What happens if this falls over, on Mars?
by 2027 we can ferry over a thousand Optimus bots as an in-situ workforce
they can dig out some caves for humans, melt some water, maybe start refining iron and looking for uranium deposits
anything they can produce in-situ is a thousand times cheaper than shipping it
TallDave:
Optimus will be on the first flights.
Cybertruck will be on the following waves, with people. :)
wayne,
Best case: A major thump and moderate hull damage. Worst case: “Faw down, go Boom!” as my offspring said early in life – residual propellant explosion/fire with considerable hull damage and a sizable debris field.
If the cargo is well-packaged, it could survive such a tip-over of either kind in usable shape and be cut out of the wreck later – perhaps by some of the Optimus bots TallDave and Trent posit or perhaps by later-arriving humans. Commodore Isaacman will be appropriately equipped to do such salvage – should it prove necessary – before his flotilla departs.
TallDave’s Optimus bots will certainly constitute a significant fraction of the downmass carried by the first cargo-only flotilla. Much of the rest of the cargo will most likely be drilling rigs to drill wells and the components of Sabatier plants to make methalox plus the solar arrays and battery packs needed to power it all.
Incidentally, I expect those initial Optimus robonauts to be pretty much the standard Earth models that should be in mass production and use here by the time of the initial cargo-only expedition. They can get around on Mars by the simple expedient of simply wearing the same Mars EVA suits intended for later-arriving humans. This will allow quick use of off-the-shelf robots and also provide an excellent workout for the suits. Any suit failures would not be fatal and the lessons learned would make the first suits actually worn by humans on Mars better than the Mark 1 Mod 0 versions for the pioneer robots.
The most interesting thing about Musk’s newly-updated aspirational timeline for Mars is that it very much overlaps with the Artemis Moon program. So SpaceX is planning to do the Moon and Mars in parallel and not the Moon, then Mars. As a man of advancing years whose biblical Three Score and Ten is already dwindling in my rear view mirror, I heartily approve. I’d like to see as much of this happen as I can before my final curtain rings down.
Dick-
good stuff.
I just don’t have a good understanding of how the landing is going to happen mechanically. (not doubting this per se, i just have little knowledge on this.)
We are enchanted with the Red Planet…
John Batchelor- Eye on the World (sept,2023)
“For the Love of Mars,”
Mathew Shindell
https://youtu.be/9iLoLswQaak
36:49
I’d love to share the optimism of Musk, but I don’t see our government EVER allowing the kind of launch rate needed for this type of activity, unless Trump really can drain the swamp. We’re talking about Starships (plural) to Mars, and each ship will require a dozen tanker flights, so the entire mission, assuming six ships, means 70-80 launches, over the course of a one-to-two month window.
There are just too many activist judges and so much graft and corruption money out there, and so much hate and lying from the left, that the interference will be intense.
And forget it if Harris wins. We’re ALL doomed then.
Mark my words, I’d hate to be right on this one. Fingers crossed Trump goes Milei-style.
Dick Eagleson, that’s some great thinking about putting the bots in suits!
Could cargo shipments be sent at other times?
Would it be a big deal if the shipment takes three or four years to reach Mars? As long as they are not perishable.
They would have to send fuel to provide a safety factor for the first humans who are coming home. You can not count on getting fuel when you first get there.
And quite frankly I do not trust robots to do everything without direct human supervision.
wayne,
The original plan for Starship entry, descent and landing (EDL) on Mars was pretty much the same as the profile for Earth EDL from orbit flown successfully – barely – on the fourth Starship test flight last June – a long, flatish descent followed, at the end, by a kick-up maneuver and a vertical powered landing.
But I think we may see this original concept modified with a borrowing of the “high-pockets” landing engine idea that is to be employed on the lunar HLS Starship. As the very first Starship test launch revealed, even a long way from the ground, Raptor engines are formidable excavators. There will be fewer engines on the Mars-bound Starships than there are on a Super Heavy launching from Earth and the Martian atmosphere is far thinner, but the engines would also be far nearer the ground before shutting down if they were to be used as the exclusive motive force for making a soft landing. Mars-bound Starships – at least the early ones – will need to have self-leveling landing gear but said gear would still find it easier to function if it didn’t have to compensate for a yawning pit that suddenly appears right where it wants to settle in.
After things have advanced from bare bones a bit on Mars, of course, paved landing areas with catch towers at their centers will be built there just as they are now being built here – maybe from Earthside steel shipped in and maybe from ISRU steel smelted and worked locally on Mars.
Chuck,
You enunciate very valid concerns. But a continuing quick rise in launch ops tempo at all current U.S. spaceports – and perhaps some new ones not too far down the road – seems inevitable and not just because of SpaceX. The Space Force, for example, while not exactly in the megaconstellation business yet, may yet be so and is, in any case, at least firmly committed to a centiconstellation. The same is true of a number of U.S.-based business entities from Amazon’s Kuiper on down.
By 2026, when Musk now proposes to be readying the initial unmanned cargo flotilla bound for Mars, SpaceX will have at least three operational Starship launch facilities – two at Starbase and one at KSC – and might have one or two additional ones at Canaveral as well. I think by that time, the locals in both places will be well-used to the ripping rumble of launches and the sharp cracks of returning boosters and ships. If Neutron flies as much as Rocket Lab intends, the locals near Wallops will hear a lot more loud noises in future years as well.
It’s remarkable how quickly one can get used to even quite noisy things once they become routine. I grew up in a small northern Michigan town about 50 miles south of a major Strategic Air Command bomber base. There were also multiple squadrons of Century-series supersonic interceptors based there – F-101s and F-102s mainly. In the late 50s, as things got spicy with the late USSR, we used to see the bomber contrails far overhead, but we were also treated to a steady cacophony of sonic booms from the interceptors at all altitudes doing practice missions. At first, it was startling. Pretty soon, my neighbors and I barely bothered to look up. The bombers were on more or less continuous rotating patrol for several years while the boom-y interceptors waxed and waned a bit with world tensions. But the reactions of my hometowners to sonic booms quickly came to resemble that of Californians toward minor to moderate earthquakes – routine and no big deal.
I very much agree that a Harris Administration would be a first-class disaster likely to exceed even the one we are now still living through under Root Vegetable Joe. That being said, Elon and his various enterprises are not without friends in high places. And the man is a street fighter. He’s not going to roll over quietly and take whatever abuse a possible next regime deigns to hand out. But if the good guys play their cards right this time, it needn’t come to that.
And, if the gods smile, Trump is indisputably elected and Elon becomes the head of a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he would be well-advised to emulate Millei as soon as his butt hits the chair in his office. But I think he will need a bigger chainsaw. Millei’s chainsaw is adequate for Argentina, perhaps, but I think Elon is going to need something more along the lines of one of those tricked-out hot-saws from the Stihl Timbersports Series.
Patrick Underwood,
Thanks for the kind words. It’s really just an application of Musk’s now-famous dictum that “the best part is no part.” Rather than a specifically Mars-rated Optimus bot, just put standard Earthside Optimus bots in the best Mars EVA suits that can be developed by 2026 and go with those. The suits for the bots would need to keep the Martian elements out, of course, and provide suitable heating and cooling, but the CO2 scrubbers and other aspects of a human-oriented life support system could be left for later as bots don’t breathe. Plenty of time to develop a Mars-hardened Optimus bot once both humans and bots are actually on Mars where iterative development can quickly take place.
pzatchok,
I’m no orbital mechanic, but NASA’s recent decision not to launch the Escapade probes toward Mars on New Glenn during the optimum “window” in October but to wait until next spring suggests that there are passably efficient Earth-to-Mars orbital trajectories possible outside of the usual every-26-month Hohmann orbit windows. Of course the Escapades don’t weight very much and I suspect the springtime trajectory is probably pretty complicated, with one or more lunar and/or Earth fly-bys involved. For a mission that is looking to land a maximized lot of mass on Mars, that would probably be a non-starter.
Robots with AI brains will probably prove fairly easy to direct even at Earth-to-Mars distances. You just teach an Optimus bot here on Earth how to do some task that is newly and unexpectedly required on Mars and then upload its new “engrams” to its colleagues on the Red Planet. How to salvage cargo from a toppled-over Starship might be one such contingency job.
Dick Eagleson wrote: “I’m no orbital mechanic, but NASA’s recent decision not to launch the Escapade probes toward Mars on New Glenn during the optimum “window” in October but to wait until next spring suggests that there are passably efficient Earth-to-Mars orbital trajectories possible outside of the usual every-26-month Hohmann orbit windows.”
Scott Manley talked about this topic a few years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSEPwokZmRQ (13 minutes)
Patrick Underwood et al,
It would seem NASA and SpaceX are way ahead of me on that put-Tesla-bots-in-EVA-suits-for-Mars thing. I just went over to Space News and, in the comments under this story, there is a short video – apparently from NASA – showing a Starship landing on Mars and three figures emerging and traveling down to the surface and then walking away from the ship. One of them takes off its helmet revealing a Tesla Optimus bot inside. Way cool.
The guy who posted the video is Roberto Juan, who is borderline supernatural at being able to find cool bits of graphics and video on pretty much any space-related topic. Kudos.
Whatever else motivated Musk to discuss these aspirations at this time, note that it came just a few days after the designer of China’s own Mars Sample Return effort talked about a mission starting in ’28 with earliest return in ’31(using two launch vehicles, like their initial human lunar flights). The US has totally screwed up its own return system for the Perseverance samples (cost estimated at $11 billion!!! _and_ the samples don’t get back until 2040!!!). So Elon is sending a message and an implicit offer to fix that situation 1000 times over.
What happens if this falls over, on Mars?
It’s like the tree falling in a forest with no one around – but without the forest.
Edward,
Thank you for the Scott Manley link. I watched that at the time it first came out but had forgotten the section about alternative Mars transfer orbit windows. It seems the cost of such trajectories is not fly-bys of other bodies or extra energy requirements, but the taking of considerable extra time in transit. That wouldn’t be acceptable for transport of humans to Mars, but it could be very practical for the transport of cargo. Musk’s Mars project is going to require a lot more cargo than human mass be transported so these alternate windows could well be a way to launch more frequent, but smaller, cargo flotillas rather than having to gear up for single giant armadas departing every 26 months with long lulls between.
Charles Lurio,
SpaceX is one of the organizations that will be submitting an alternate proposal for Mars Sample Return to NASA. Musk’s most recently stated aspirational schedule for initial Mars missions probably is, at least in part, a pointed reminder to NASA that SpaceX will be proceeding Mars-ward in a major way and fairly soon with or without consideration of those samples waiting at Jezero Crater. JPL, in particular, has long been doing its level best to pretend SpaceX doesn’t exist. A pointed reminder to the contrary is very much in order.
wayne asked: “What happens if this falls over, on Mars?”
Dick Eagleson suggested: “Best case: A major thump and moderate hull damage. Worst case: “Faw down, go Boom!” as my offspring said early in life – residual propellant explosion/fire with considerable hull damage and a sizable debris field.”
The worst case may not be as large of an explosion as we might imagine, because Mars’ atmosphere is a giant CO2 fire extinguisher. The worst case would have an initial explosion (heard or otherwise) as the O2 and methane propellants mix and burn, and there would be a fire, but I doubt the fire would be sustained for long.
Fire is an interesting phenomenon. If we view a candle flame, we see what looks like a surface of flame, but there is not much chemical reaction occurring within that surface. Inside the candle flame is a lot of fuel and not much oxygen, too little for much reaction to take place. As we look closer toward the flame, we discover that the fuel to oxygen ratio approaches stoichiometric, meaning that there is the correct ratio of fuel to oxygen for the chemical reaction. It is at the stoichiometric region that the reaction is strong enough to sustain itself and where the energy release produces the visible flame. As we look farther out from the flame’s surface, there is too little fuel for the amount of oxygen for much reaction to take place. Thus, it is a the surface, the visible flame, where the majority of the heat is generated.
In Mars’ atmosphere, the flame can only sustain itself as long as the oxygen and methane can continue to mix stoichiometrically (2O2 + CH4 –> CO2 + 2H2O), and so long as there is not so much CO2 around to absorb too much of the heat of the reaction, preventing the O2 and CH4 molecules from breaking into their constituent atoms, which must happen in order for the oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen to react and form the product molecules.