By 
(Illustrative image, Reuters) (Elon Musk)
While it may appear like SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is investing most of his time creating distasteful comments on his social media platform X, Elon Musk claims he’s still dead set on bringing humanity to Mars.
In a previous post, Elon Musk says that his space company’s massive Starship spacecraft is “structured to travel across our entire solar system and beyond to the cloud of near by objects,” maybe mentioning the huge spherical shell known as the Oort Cloud that surrounds the solar system.
“A future Starship, more giant and more advanced, will travel to other star systems,” he mentioned, adding yet another even greater and more ambitious step to his already great vision.
No need to say, the company has its work cut out to achieve. This week, SpaceX tried its third orbital launch of Starship, arriving at an apogee of 145 miles and passing the continent of Africa, before colliding uncontrollably into the Indian Ocean.
Other than the anticlimactic end, the launch was considered a great victory, creating a new milestone for the SpaceX in its attempts to advance its super-heavy launch platform.
To Elon Musk, the stainless steel rocket is humanity’s ticket to eventually become an interplanetary species.
Naturally, Elon Musk took this week’s launch as a chance to present some features — and maybe overly — ambitious timelines.
“Starship will be on Mars within five years,” Elon Musk claimed.
To put that timeline into view, NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, which will consist of a Starship taking scientists from the Moon’s orbit down to the surface, was actually slated for 2025, but was took back to 2026.
In other words, before Starship can “cross our whole solar system and beyond,” SpaceX still has many things to prove — and that’s putting it lightly.
For beginners, Starship still requires to be capable to reliably get into orbit and bring it back to the surface in one piece, which is simple said than done considering it dwarfs the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.
Then the company has to prove that one Starship is able refuel the other one while in Earth’s orbit. SpaceX also has to make a life support system for vast trips through the solar system, let himself search a way to actually have sufficient fuel to arrive at its goal.
If it were up to Elon Musk, upcoming iterations of the rocket would be capable to complete the 4.2 light-years to the Sun’s nearest star, Proxima Centauri, and beyond. At present levels of technology, completing that area would take near about 6,300 Earth years.
In other terms, humanity would likely either have to hibernate or copy on board to get to look another star system — unless SpaceX detects a method to break the laws of physics and move at the speed of light with something like a warp drive, which is still improbable.
Elon Musk, of course, is aware to making daring claims about what SpaceX will result for the future of humanity.
But whether actual life will be able to match with his controversial perspective is still mentioned in the stars.
