A rocket scientist’s vision meets reality Elon Musk has never been shy about his goals. In 2016 he announced a plan to make humanity a multiplanetary species, sending one million people to Mars on a fleet of reusable Starships. He said initial landings would occur in the mid-2020s, with a self-sustaining colony by 2050. He inspired a new generation of space enthusiasts and compelled stodgy space agencies to reconsider their timelines. Almost a decade later we’re in a very different place. SpaceX’s Starship has flown ten test flights, only five of which were fully successful and the Artemis program that will supply much of the lunar infrastructure is already behind schedule. Musk has moved the goalposts repeatedly, saying in March 2025 that interplanetary colonization is 20-30 years away. Given all this, is his Mars timeline still possible? As someone who’s followed the space industry for years, I find Musk’s vision both exciting and terrifying. Great leaps require boldness but colonization in his lifetime now looks unlikely. After 2025 the evidence, technical, financial and geopolitical, says humanity will get to Mars but not on Musk’s original timeline. Below, I explain why. Progress Since 2016: Successes and Painful Lessons SpaceX made unparalleled advancements within only a few years. The Starship Super Heavy rocket is the biggest and most powerful ever made, and it will be reusable. A total of ten test flights had already been completed by August 2025; Starship Flight 10 landed safely in orbit, deployed mock satellites and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico. NASA also celebrated the day because Starship is also its next lunar lander for the Artemis III Moon mission. The company is constructing more launch towers and has revealed larger models, Starship 2 and Starship 3, which would take 200 tonnes to Mars with reduced orbital refuelling flights. Musk calls it sending ten flights per day and eventually thousands of ships. It hasn't been all smooth sailing though. Five of the seven Starship flights have been concluded in explosions or uncontrolled destruction. The Mars re-entry essential heat‑shield tiles have been hard to reuse, and orbital refuelling, the cornerstone of the architecture, has yet to be demonstrated. A Reuters interview in May 2025 caught Musk in a short mood: he provided a 50-50 probability of launching the first Starship without people to Mars in late 2026 and conceded they would have to wait for the subsequent window if refuelling is not possible. Even NASA is estimating a 70 % probability that Starship's capability to land humans will not be operational by February 2028. These delays compound through Musk's timeline since every window for Mars only occurs once every 26 months. Reuters Moving Goalposts and Revised Timelines One of the most glaring signs that Musk's original timeline is lagging is his own statements. In 2016, he was speaking in terms of sending crew as early as 2024; in late 2024, he was projecting "people within seven years.". In a March 2025 SpaceX’s 23rd anniversary appearance, he said an unmanned Starship would depart for Mars by the end of 2026, carrying Optimus robots, human flights possibly starting in 2029 but more probably in 2031. A couple of days later, he responded to an X user's question about population growth on Mars and said interplanetary colonisation will require 20–30 years, a considerable admission that a million-person colony is not in the works. SpaceX’s 23rd anniversary His defenders point out that even if timelines are delayed, SpaceX often accomplishes what everyone else considers impossible. Harvard business professor Matthew Weinzierl argues that Musk's aggressive timelines attract talent and capital and that the firm's culture of rapid iteration has turned moonshot ideas into reality. Critics respond that simply arriving at an open Mars window doesn't constitute a plan. In an opinion piece in Scientific American, NASA advisor Paul Sutter likened Musk's releases to organizing a camping trip without buying equipment – "and your car is in the shop. And has exploded". The Independent summarized Sutter's argument: Starship design requires orbital refuelling, none of its test flights have been back to Mars, and human‑rated life support and radiation shielding are years away. Former astronaut José Hernández said we are “a good 15 years” from Mars, not five. Matthew Weinzierl Paul Sutter The Technical and Physiological Mountain Mars is much harder than the Moon. Travel times are 6-9 months each way and communication delays are 4-24 minutes. During solar conjunctions, Mars is uncontactable for 2 weeks. That means crews have to operate autonomously and pre-program contingency plans, a far cry from the near real-time support the Apollo astronauts had. Once on the surface, colonists will face high radiation because Mars has no global magnetic field; cosmic rays deliver 8 times the dose allowed for nuclear workers. Shielding solutions like hydrogenated boron-nitride nanotubes are still experimental. Human bodies don’t do well in low gravity and isolation. Long-duration spaceflight weakens muscles, degrades bone density and can impair vision and immune system. Mental health is compromised by confinement and delay in communications. The Planetary Society says no engineering solution can eliminate the risk; instead, robust medical and psychological support has to be built into the mission architecture. None of those systems exist for a Mars class mission. Even if we can send humans, landing them is another challenge. Mars’ thin atmosphere makes aerodynamic braking impossible for heavy payloads. Supersonic retropropulsion, using rocket engines to slow down the descent, looks promising but has never been used on a crewed vehicle. Musk’s reusable booster concept has never demonstrated a controlled landing on Earth, let alone after interplanetary flight. NASA’s reliance on Starship for Artemis raises concerns: if the lunar variant is delayed, the entire Mars schedule stretches accordingly. The Elephant in the Room: Cost and Economics Other than technology, colonisation will entail finance. Musk himself suggests this. In October 2024 he replied to a question about the expense of sending off X: recent US missions to Mars have cost approximately $1 billion per tonne of payload. He suggested that a city sustaining itself would require at least a million tons of equipment, which would be more than $1,000 trillion, more than the US GDP. Musk estimates that advances in the reusability of rockets could cut the cost by a factor of 1,000 to $1 trillion, or $25 billion a year for 40 years. That's still more than NASA spends in a single year and a lot more than any individual company can spend. Independent analysis confirms the staggering cost. NASA has estimated human Mars exploration at $50-150 billion over ten years, SpaceNews at $2 trillion. Florida Tech states the radiation environment would require expensive shielding and health issues would take away from workforce productivity. In order to fund colonisation, Musk has said colonists can borrow money for a spot on a Starship, which raises issues with "survival of the richest". The Berkeley Beacon continues only 100 people can fit on each Starship; even with 1,000 ships, one window of opportunity would contain only 100,000 people, far short of a million. In economic terms, the dream feels less like a scalable public venture and more like an ultra‑elite adventure. Legal and Geopolitical Roadblocks Musk’s timeline assumes a permissive legal environment. But the Outer Space Treaty (OST) of 1967 says no nation can claim sovereignty over celestial bodies. A March 2025 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists notes that Musk wants a million-person settlement in 30 years and has even said “the Martians will decide how they are ruled,” implying a new political entity. The OST explicitly forbids that. Enforcement may seem abstract but establishing a de facto Mars nation could trigger geopolitical tensions like colonial land grabs. Early settlers will still be dependent on Earth for supplies so Earth governments will have leverage to demand compliance. Bulletin The Artemis Accords, signed by the U.S., U.K., Canada and other nations, outline principles for lunar and Mars activities, including resource utilization and interoperability. Musk’s private colonization scheme will have to fit into those frameworks. NASA’s partnership with SpaceX for Artemis gives some oversight but if Musk goes solo on Mars, he may find regulators less accommodating. In short, colonization is not just a technical or financial challenge; it’s a political project that requires multilateral cooperation. NASA’s Route: Methodical but Slow As Musk is off on his independent timeline, NASA keeps to a slower pace. Sending astronauts to Mars by 2040 has been described by agency officials as "audacious". Prior to sending people further than the Moon, NASA plans to construct the Gateway lunar base and test life-support systems deep in space. Through April 2025, the Artemis schedule had included in April 2026 Artemis 2 (crewed lunar fly‑by), mid‑2027 Artemis 3, September 2028 Artemis 4 and March 2030 Artemis 5. All of these missions depend upon SpaceX's Starship performing consistently well; serial test failure in early 2025 gave rise to speculation regarding a switch to Blue Origin's lander. Even if Artemis is successful, a trip to Mars will require in-situ resource utilization, adequate radiation shielding and a deep-space carrier, facilities not to be expected before the late 2030s or 2040s. Can Musk Land Humans in His Lifetime? Musk is 54 in 2025. In case colonisation is not 20–30 years away, he would be in his mid‑70s or mid‑80s when the first permanent settlement takes place. That is within his lifetime, given average billionaire longevity. But the self-reliant city he imagines, with major industry and a population of a million, is well out of sight, probably more than 2050 away. Even Musk's own back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest it would cost $1 trillion spread over 40 years to build such a city, in times of secure economic and political stability. Given the pace at which Starship is being developed, life-support and radiation sophistication, and the international agreements required, the first small colonies will probably emerge in the early 2030s, but a successful colony will have another couple of decades before it materializes. The most probable near‑term schedule is a proof‑of‑concept mission: an unmanned Starship landing in 2027 with robots and experiments, followed by crewed sortie missions in the 2030s. They will be more science outposts than city colonies, like Antarctica research stations. They will prove technologies like MOXIE, which produces oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, and begin to extract water from regolith. They can even construct the first homes with local materials. Whether that becomes a permanent colony relies on continual funding and international collaboration. Inspiration Versus Realism Elon Musk has already changed spaceflight by making reusability normal and resuscitating human exploration. His ambitious ideas encourage governments to aim bigger and his willingness to put his own funds where his mouth is demonstrates he is not a fool. But after 2025 things look grim. Technological problems like orbital refuelling, radiation protection and landing heavy payloads remain unsolved; economics are in the trillions so it's a nation-state venture, not an individual one; and the legal frameworks like the Outer Space Treaty preclude single-sided colonization. Even Musk himself these days puts the timescale in the 2040s. So will Elon Musk colonize Mars during his lifetime? I think he'll get humans to Mars, perhaps as early as the 2030s. He may even live long enough to see the construction of the first outpost. But a million-person self-sustaining colony, the vision that inspired so many, will be out of reach for a very long time after he's retired. That is no disparagement to the achievement; it's a recognition that making human life beyond Earth is a multi-generational endeavor. To pursue this vision, we have to applaud Musk's boldness while bringing it back down to earth and understanding of how much work lies before us. References 1. https://www.astronomy.com/space-exploration/spacex-starship-flight-10-viewed-as-roaring-success/ https://www.astronomy.com/space-exploration/spacex-starship-flight-10-viewed-as-roaring-success/ 2. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/musk-aiming-send-uncrewed-starship-mars-by-end-2026-2025-05-30/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/musk-aiming-send-uncrewed-starship-mars-by-end-2026-2025-05-30/ 3. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/elon-musk-gives-a-timeline-for-human-landings-on-mars-starship-departs-for-mars-/articleshow/119194114.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/elon-musk-gives-a-timeline-for-human-landings-on-mars-starship-departs-for-mars-/articleshow/119194114.cms 4. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/15/musk-humans-live-on-mars-spacex https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/15/musk-humans-live-on-mars-spacex 5. https://www.independent.co.uk/space/elon-musk-trump-mars-trip-spacex-cost-b2718730.html# https://www.independent.co.uk/space/elon-musk-trump-mars-trip-spacex-cost-b2718730.html# 6. https://berkeleybeacon.com/its-survival-of-the-richest-on-musks-colonized-mars/# https://berkeleybeacon.com/its-survival-of-the-richest-on-musks-colonized-mars/#

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