Humanity will go to Mars ‘in this decade’, SpaceX president predicts
Acrewed Mars mission could happen sooner than you think. Astronauts will likely make it to the Red Planet’s surface before the end of the 2020s, SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell said recently. “I think it will be in this decade, yes. People on the Moon sooner,” Shotwell said. “I think we need to get a large delivery to the surface of Mars, and then people will start thinking harder about it,” she added. “Then I think within five or six years, people will see that that will be a real place to go.”
SpaceX aims to be the one to make this ambitious vision a reality. The company is developing a huge, reusable rocketspaceship combo called Starship to take people and payloads to the Moon, Mars and beyond. Starship already has several Moon missions on its docket. In 2018, for example, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa booked the vehicle for an aroundthe-Moon trip with a target launch date of 2023. And NASA picked Starship to be the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, which plans to put astronauts down near the Moon’s south pole in 2025 – including the first woman and person of colour. NASA views Artemis as a Moon-to-Mars program and intends to launch a crewed Red Planet mission in 2040 or thereabouts — about a decade later than Shotwell sees boots first crunching into the red dirt. SpaceX is working towards a big milestone in Starship’s development — the vehicle’s first-ever orbital test flight, which the company wants to launch from its South Texas facility, called Starbase, in the near future. That launch cannot happen, however, until the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) wraps up an environmental assessment of the activities at Starbase.