Anyone who keeps track of Elon Musk knows the world's richest man has a penchant for setting aspirational schedules for his companies. SpaceX misses those ambitious timelines so often that Musk has joked the company specializes in making the impossible late.
So, if you have an opportunity to interview him, why spend time asking Musk to prognosticate when one of his companies will do something years in the future? This is especially true for things that are impossible to know, like when will SpaceX land a Starship on Mars? Predictably, Musk replied to that question Thursday by saying it was feasible for Starship to achieve a Mars landing—without people on board—in three or four years.
Landing Starship on Mars in 2026 or 2027 is probably among the least likely of all the feasible outcomes, but setting this timetable helps keep SpaceX's workforce razor-focused. Starship is a revolutionary design, with the goal of becoming a rapidly reusable rocket that could fly thousands of times per year. It's also the largest rocket ever built, with at least twice the thrust of NASA's Saturn V rocket from the Apollo program more than 50 years ago. Musk described Starship on Thursday as a "generalized transport system to anywhere in the Solar System."
Generalized is one way to describe the bulk of Musk's 50-minute discussion Thursday with Clay Mowry, the president of the International Astronautical Federation, which puts on a well-attended and often interesting annual conference called the International Astronautical Congress. This year, the IAC is in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Not when, but how?
There's just so much for SpaceX to do before Starship can get to Mars. The giant rocket first has to make it to low-Earth orbit—SpaceX has a shot to do this before the end of the year—then engineers need to solve the problem of refilling the Starship rocket with cryogenic propellants while it's in space. SpaceX needs to show it can recover the Starship vehicle, which stands 15 stories tall on top of its huge Super Heavy booster on the launch pad, after a blistering reentry back into Earth's atmosphere. Then SpaceX must do it on the red planet, tens of millions of miles away.
This is not to mention the travails of navigating through deep space, a well-trodden path for government space agencies but not for commercial companies. Keeping Starship's super-cold methane and liquid oxygen propellants thermally conditioned for the multi-month journey to Mars will also require some innovation.
The bottom line is it will be an arduous undertaking. Starship will fly hundreds—probably thousands?—of times before the rocket nails a controlled landing on Mars. SpaceX's brilliant engineers certainly have creative ideas and novel plans to get Starship to the red planet, so why not ask Musk about them when you have him for a rare hourlong one-on-one conversation?
It's the how that is most interesting now, not the when or why, especially for an audience interested enough to tune in at the IAC. Musk's consistent vision has been to build a self-sustaining city on Mars, and Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, is central to that goal. He has articulated this vision in nearly every interview that touches on SpaceX.
SpaceX's main focus now is to get the Starship into orbit. Rockets, especially new ones, are finicky and prone to failure, so that's not a simple task. But the company's track record would suggest the Starship will make it to orbit, and eventually recover the rocket's first-stage booster, named the Super Heavy. So where does the program go from there?
Musk's participation by video conference Thursday at the IAC in Azerbaijan came seven years after he unveiled the forerunner to Starship in a keynote address at the 2016 meeting of the IAC in Mexico.
Mowry, who posed the questions to Musk Thursday, is a longtime corporate executive who is passionate about mentoring future leaders in the space industry. I've known him for more than a decade, and he's always struck me as one of the nicest people in the industry.
Asking the right questions
It's unclear whether there were any ground rules for Musk's participation in the IAC session on Thursday. But Mowry's questions missed the mark at a time when the Starship program is at a critical point, and he didn't probe with follow-up questions to tease out more insightful answers.
Musk wasn't asked about the status of the second full-scale test flight of Starship, which SpaceX says is held up by the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA and the US Fish and Wildlife Service are reviewing SpaceX's modifications to Starship and its launch pad in South Texas following the rocket's first test flight in April, which ended as the vehicle spun out of control a few minutes after liftoff after suffering multiple engine failures.
It would have been good to know Musk's perspective on the regulatory reviews beyond his posts on X, his social media site. Musk only briefly touched on the next Starship test flight in response to one of Mowry's questions, saying he didn't want to set expectations too high.
"There’s a ton of new technology in this rocket," Musk said, referring primarily to a redesign of the rocket's stage separation system, which will detach the 33-engine Super Heavy booster from the Starship upper stage a few minutes after launch. Since the April test flight, SpaceX engineers have changed how the stages will separate, with the Starship's upper stage engines now expected to ignite just before the release of the Super Heavy booster, rather than moments after stage separation.
“This is the first time we’re doing it, so I would say that’s the riskiest part for Flight 2," Musk said. "If the engines light and the ship doesn’t blow itself up during stage separation, then I think we’ve got a decent chance of reaching orbit."
If everything goes perfectly, the Super Heavy booster on the next test flight will attempt a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico east of the Texas coast. The stainless steel Starship upper stage will accelerate to a velocity just shy of the speed required to enter a stable orbit around Earth. That trajectory will bring the vehicle back into the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean for a crash landing off the coast of Hawaii.
“The ship is designed to re-enter and has a heat shield," Musk said. "We think it’ll work, but we aren’t sure it’ll work. So if it doesn’t work, we want it to not work over the Pacific, which is quite a large body of water with almost no people on it.”
Mowry also asked Musk when SpaceX might land a Super Heavy booster back on its launch pad. SpaceX's plan for this involves a daring technique to capture the nearly 30-foot-diameter (9-meter) Super Heavy booster using dual robotic arms on the Starship launch tower, a latticework structure Musk has dubbed "Mechazilla." As the booster descends back to its launch pad, the arms will close around the rocket to capture it in mid-air, then lower it back to the ground.
The Starship vehicle itself, part upper stage and part spacecraft, is also designed for catches using the Mechazilla arms. The rocket's architecture is centered on making Starship rapidly reusable, with an operations mode more like airplanes than traditional rockets. Starship will return to Earth from orbit, requiring advanced heat shield technology and more sophisticated guidance, navigation, and control than a returning booster, like the Super Heavy or the first stage of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, which never reaches orbital velocity.
"I think there’s a decent chance, depending on when our licenses are granted, that we will catch the booster within the next year, or maybe less than a year," Musk said Thursday, perhaps hinting at more uncertainty about when the FAA might approve a Super Heavy booster to come back to land. "And then, hopefully, if we get lucky, we might catch the ship towards the end of next year.”
Asked when the Starship might be ready to carry operational satellites into orbit, Musk said there's a "good chance" the new rocket could start deploying SpaceX's Starlink Internet satellites "roughly a year from now." Eventually, apart from its use as a deep space transporter, Starship could launch huge government spy satellites or large astronomy telescopes closer to Earth. SpaceX says the rocket can loft a payload up to 150 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.
"The part that will take the longest is solving for safe ship reentry and landing," Musk said. "It’s actually fine to start launching satellites even before we solve for ship reusability. That is the hardest part of the equation. With Falcon 9, we’ve gone pretty far with reusability. It’s now highly unusual for the booster to not come back and land.”
Asking about the multibillion-dollar financial burden of developing Starship would have been just as important as inquiring for details about Starship's technical uncertainties. Of course, Musk's prerogative is not to answer probing questions on the privately run Starship program. But he's been willing to dish on many aspects of Starship if someone asks the right questions to dig for details and insights that aren't part of his usual presentation.
The Starship is a centerpiece of NASA's Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon's surface later this decade. NASA has awarded SpaceX contracts valued at $4 billion to develop a derivative of Starship as a human-rated lander to ferry crews from lunar orbit down to the Moon's surface, then back into space on the first leg of the journey back home.
This is a key part of the Starship story and a part of the program where there's a quantifiable public interest. NASA didn't award SpaceX the first contract for a Starship Moon lander until 2021, after pouring billions of dollars into other elements of the Artemis lunar program for a decade or longer. This means the Starship landing craft, or perhaps new spacesuits for astronauts to wear walking on the Moon, will be the final part of the Artemis architecture to be ready for an expedition to the Moon's south pole.
In August, the NASA official who oversees the Artemis program said the space agency might look at diverting the Artemis III mission—currently penciled in as the first Artemis lunar landing—to pursue other objectives if the Starship lander isn't ready as it nears the current target launch date at the end of 2025.
Getting the Starship lander to the Moon will require multiple flights of Starship "tankers" to replenish propellant using a ship-to-ship connection never tested in space at such large scales. And Starship will need a life support system to produce breathable air and a comfortable living space for astronauts, whether they're going to the Moon or Mars.
Despite these concerns, the Starship Moon lander barely got a mention Thursday. "Obviously you need legs, but I suspect you can land the ship with minor modifications on the Moon," Musk said. This would have been a good place to ask a follow-up.
Six years later, we’re a year closer to Mars
During a 2017 speech at an IAC meeting in Australia, Musk presented an updated design for the rocket that eventually became Starship. Its first incarnation was called the Interplanetary Transport System, then it was rechristened the BFR, short for "big f#@$king rocket."
At that meeting six years ago, Musk said he hoped to launch the BFR to Mars as early as 2022, five years in the future. Now, Mars could be four years away, according to Musk.
Musk is far from the only person in the space business to make wildly optimistic schedule predictions. If we're being honest, few of NASA's schedules pass a smell test. There are many commercial launch companies that often say they will fly new rockets in one or two years. That rarely happens, until eventually they're right, and a new rocket finally gets off the ground.
For those of us who follow the twists and turns of spaceflight with close interest, it's an unfortunate reality that questionable schedule forecasts are baked into our expectations. Most people in the audience at the IAC in Baku, and those who took time to watch Musk online, know this, too.
It's also not unrealistic to assume attendees who traveled from around the world to a space conference in Baku on the Caspian Sea know about Starship. It would have been more meaningful to use a conference that describes itself as the "world's premier global space event" as a platform for something new, not another high-level Starship overview.
