2 firms look to beat SpaceX to ‘audacious’ Mars landing
SpaceX could lose the race to send the first private space mission to Mars. Maybe.
For years, Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, has talked of making humanity an interplanetary species by someday sending colonists to Mars. The company is building a giant spacecraft, Starship, with that goal in mind.
But a newer rocket company, Relativity Space, and a small startup founded by an engineer who used to head rocket engine development at SpaceX, on Tuesday announced plans to send a privately developed robotic lander to Mars. Optimistically — very optimistically — the two companies say they could do it as soon as 2½ years from now, when the positions of Earth and Mars line up again.
Timothy Ellis, the CEO and a founder of Relativity, said the way SpaceX aspired to do things “at the edge of crazy and ambitious and audacious” was an inspiration.
“Those kinds of goals attract the best people to work on them,” Ellis said. “We are more audacious than some of the other companies.”
If a commercial Mars mission succeeds, it could open a new market in which institutions, companies and national space agencies could send payloads to the red planet at an economical cost.
That would be similar to how several companies hope to make money by sending payloads to the moon for paying customers including NASA, starting as soon as later this year. But it would be on a more difficult and distant scale. A NASA mission to Mars costs at least half a billion dollars, although that includes sophisticated instruments.
Ellis declined to say how much the mission would cost, but said investment money raised by Relativity, as well as revenue from its contracts to launch commercial satellites, could be enough to pay for the Mars mission. Relativity has, for example, a deal with the company OneWeb to put broadband satellites into orbit.
But there are many reasons for skepticism.
A decade ago, for example, several space companies promised riches from asteroid mining, but they went out of business without ever getting close to an asteroid. Even Musk routinely gives overly optimistic predictions for SpaceX’s next milestone. (In 2016, he said Starship, which at the time was called the Interplanetary Transport System and was an even larger design, would make its first uncrewed flight to Mars by 2022.)
For now, Ellis lacks Musk’s record of eventually achieving most of his big promises.
Relativity has yet to launch any rockets. The first flight of its Terran 1 rocket might occur within a few weeks from Cape Canaveral in Florida. But the Mars mission relies on a much larger rocket, Terran R, which is comparable in size and lifting capability to a Falcon 9, the primary SpaceX rocket that has flown 31 times so far this year. That design is not scheduled to get off the ground until late 2024 or early 2025, Ellis said.
Relativity’s collaborator, Impulse Space, is an even younger company with even less of a track record. But its founder, Thomas Mueller, is a veteran of the space business and was Employee No. 1 when Musk started SpaceX in 2002. Mueller led the development of the Merlin rocket engines that power the Falcon 9 rockets.
Mueller retired from SpaceX in 2020. A year later, he started Impulse to develop spacecraft for transportation between locations in space.
“I feel like if it’s not something that’s challenging and that people think is difficult and you may not be able to do it, it’s not hard enough,” Mueller said. “We need to do stuff that people think can’t be done.”
Landing on Mars — arriving at some 12,000 mph, not burning up in the atmosphere and then coming to a stop on the ground, in one piece, just seven minutes later — falls in the category of challenging. Only NASA and China have had successful missions on the red planet’s surface.