SpaceX is on track to launch its first uncrewed mission to Mars in less than four years from now, the private spaceflight company’s founder and CEO Elon Musk said on Friday.
“I think we have a fighting chance of making that second Mars transfer window,” Space.com quoted Elon Musk as saying during a discussion at the International Mars Society Convention.
By “window”, Elon Musk was referring to the Mars launch opportunity in 2024.
The opportunity to launch a mission to Mars comes every 26 months, the report in Space.com said. After Nasa, China and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) launched missions to Mars in July this year, the next “window” is set to open in 2022.
Musk was further quoted as saying as that SpaceX “would maybe have a shot of sending or trying to send something to Mars in three years,” if the mission timings didn’t depend on the “orbital mechanics that call for Mars launches every 26 months”.
“Earth and Mars won’t be in the best position…But the window is four years away, because of them being in different parts of the solar system,” he said.
WATCH ELON MUSK’s INTERVIEW HERE
LAUNCH TO MARS ON STARSHIP
SpaceX will launch its first uncrewed mission to Mars on its massive Starship rocket.
Starship is a “reusable rocket-and-spacecraft combo” which is being developed at the company’s South Texas facility, the report said.
The report further said, “SpaceX is also planning to use Starship for missions to the Moon starting in 2022, as well as point-to-point trips around the Earth.”
PLANS TO BUILD A MARS BASE?
Elon Musk has believed that human beings “need to establish a permanent and self-sustaining presence on Mars to ensure “the continuance of consciousness as we know it”” – just in case, some nuclear war or asteroid strike leave Earth uninhabitable, the report said.
However, Musk’s SpaceX doesn’t have any plans to build a Mars base.
“As a transportation company, its only goal is to ferry cargo [and humans] to and from the red planet, facilitating the development of someone else’s Mars base,” the report said.
Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin was quoted as saying: “SpaceX is taking on the biggest single challenge, which is the transportation system. There’s all sorts of other systems that are going to be needed.”
ELON MUSK’s SPACEX
SpaceX launched two Americans toward orbit from Florida on Saturday in a mission that marks the first spaceflight of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil in nine years.
SpaceX is also preparing another Starship prototype — SN8 — for a 12-mile-high (20 kilometers) test flight in the future.
Moreover, in 2024, Nasa astronauts will return to the Moon under the Artemis program.
Nasa selected SpaceX to build a Starship Lunar Lander for the agency’s Artemis program which aims to send the first woman and next man to the moon’s surface in 2024.
Also, Nasa said that its four astronauts are set to launch to the space station on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket. The launch is targeted for early-to-mid November and the four astronauts are set to return in spring 2021.