How Elon Musk Will Bring Humanity To Mars

If you still find yourself wondering why Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of the Tesla electric car company is so obsessed with Mars and why he keeps launching and crashing spaceships down in Texas, then this is the video for you. Today we’re breaking down some details about Elon’s mission to the Red Planet. So get in loser, we’re going to Mars.

So, many people probably still don’t know that Elon founded his SpaceX company long before he ever got involved with Tesla. We all know him as the electric car guy, but at his core, Elon is obsessed with space. This all started after he made his first fortune from selling his share of Paypal to Ebay back in the early 2000’s and gaining about 180 million dollars. Elon made his first major investment into the idea of an aerospace company that would eventually land a greenhouse full of plants on the surface of Mars and thereby inspire the people of Earth to want to explore space again and return NASA to the kind of relevance they saw back in the 1960’s race to the Moon.

As with most things in life, it wasn’t quite as simple as he first imagined. But SpaceX did end up going off on a side quest to make space transportation more affordable than anyone had ever thought possible. They invented the reusable rocket booster. And then they started building the largest ever network of telecommunications satellites to beam high speed internet to the entire world. And as with any good video game, these tangents just serve to help you level up and conquer your main goal, which in this case still remains, going to Mars.

But Elon’s idea has grown over the past 20 years from just landing a greenhouse and calling it a day, to literally colonizing a whole new planet. The primary goal for Elon Musk and SpaceX is now to establish a human city of around 1 million people on the planet Mars within our lifetime. 

When Elon was recently called out by Bernie Sanders for supposedly being a greedy rich man. Elon’s come back was simply to say, “I am accumulating resources to help make life multiplanetary and extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”

It’s pretty trippy, right? But they’ve got a plan, and the self landing rockets, the internet satellites and the exploding spaceships are all pieces of the puzzle.

Bridging the gap between Earth and Mars is something we’ve pretty much figured out by now. We can fire a remote controlled car from one planet to the other very successfully. But when we’re talking about sending people, we have to think big. This can’t just be Matt Damon kicking it on Mars growing potatoes in a tent. We need to send a bunch of people and a ton of stuff, all in one go. And to do that we need a whole new type of spaceship, and that’s where the Starship comes into play.

Starship is the vehicle that is going to be able to not only carry people and supplies to Mars, but also bring them back to Earth again. The idea is that it will be very big, very powerful and most importantly fully reusable, with the ability to land itself and then take off again. SpaceX were the first and remain the only company to figure out hope to get their rocket booster engines to come back down and land under their own power. The idea is that Starship will do the same, and that’s the first hurdle that they're trying to clear with the tests that have been going on in Texas over the past couple of months. The Starship prototypes launch up into the air about 10 kilometers, then they make a controlled drop back down to the Earth guided by fins on the body, kind of like a skydiver, then at the bottom of the fall, the rockets kick back on and flip the whole vehicle so that it points straight up again and lands slowly in the same position that it launched from. That’s the idea at least, in each of the four test flights that have been done, the whole thing ends up crashing and exploding instead of landing. Most people would assume that kind of result means the test was a failure, but that’s not the case. They’re trying to do something that’s never been done before and they’re trying to dial in the system so that it can reliably land the Starship every single time and eventually people’s lives will depend on that to happen. So working the bugs out now is very important. They went through a similar process with landing the Falcon 9 rocket boosters, it took several tries before they were able to consistently recover the engines and reuse them.

Once Starship is able to nail the takeoff and landing within Earth’s atmosphere, the next step is to reach orbit. This will still be done without human passengers, but it will have to involve one new element, which is the Super Heavy Booster. This is a humongous rocket engine that the Starship sits on top of, and this is the power that they are going to need to eventually get a fully loaded Starship into Earth orbit some day. The idea is that Starship will be hauling 100 metric tons of cargo on it’s flight to Mars, so getting that clear of Earth’s gravity is going to be an epic feat.

So far, they’ve built one non functioning prototype of the Super heavy that Elon called a manufacturing pathfinder to help guide the design process. This has already led to a second prototype that they hope to have on a launch pad by late April and might already be capable of reaching orbit.

So, once the Starship and the Super Heavy are locked in, then that’s pretty much it, we’re ready to go to Mars. But how fast does that happen? Well, that depends on your perception of time. See people who follow Tesla closely have already become familiar with the concept of “Elon Time”. And that’s the difference between when Elon says something is going to happen, and when it actually happens in real life. A great example would be in 2019 at a Tesla event called Autonomy Day, in his presentation, Elon promised us that by the end of 2020 we would see one million fully autonomous robo taxis on streets of America. Obviously that was not the case. And even now Tesla are not quite able to make one car fully autonomous, let alone a whole fleet of them. I don’t think it’s so much a case of Elon over exaggerating or trying to oversell a product, I think he’s just naturally very optimistic and he seems to forget that Elon himself is an anomaly in human kind and not everyone else is going to be able to work with the same drive and ingenuity as he does. So, just something to keep in mind when we start talking about timelines here.

The goal as it stands is to land humans on Mars by the year 2026. And those astronauts will be preceded by an uncrewed Starship that would land on Mars in 2024. This is something Elon was talking about as recently as December of last year and he said he was “highly confident” in this timeline. That’s just a bit over 5 years until people on Mars. According to Elon Time, at least. Third party experts have said that SpaceX is probably closer to a 2029 or or 2031 timeline for a human Mars landing. It’s a little tricky because the Earth and Mars only lineup perfectly every 26 months. So if you miss a window, there’s a long wait for another chance.

So, we land a crew of people on Mars. Then what? Here’s where things really get nuts, Elon’s master plan is to transport 1 million people from the Earth to Mars by the year 2050. And to do that, SpaceX will have to build 1,000 Starship rockets over the course of ten years. Each ship can carry 100 people and 100 metric tons of supplies and equipment. To reach the goal of 1 million people, they would need to launch an average of 3 ships per day over 10 years. But, that’s not possible to do because of the Earth Mars window that only comes around every 26 months. In those windows there are about 30 days where it is possible to fly from one planet to the other in about 6 months. Elon’s plan to make the most of this situation is to actually have the entire fleet of 1,000 ships all waiting in orbit around the Earth and then gradually depart over the 30 day opening. So, we would spend the 26 months launching ships into orbit, where they would all hang out and wait for their chance to Mars. According to my feeble math skills, that would equal out to about 38 launches per month over the 26 month period. Still a lot of space ships, but definitely not 3 per day.

And why exactly would 1 million people want to follow Elon Musk to Mars? Well, basically the same thing that brought settlers to America to begin with - the promise of a better life. The carrot that Elon is holding out right now is jobs, he says there will be a lot of jobs available on Mars. He’s not just looking for scientists and engineers, Elon wants anyone to be able to travel to Mars and if they can’t afford it, he wants them to have loans available to cover the initial cost.

Now how does this all work? The basic procedure for a Mars flight starts with the Starship and the Super Heavy blasting off from the Earth’s surface. Once Starship reaches orbit, the Super Heavy detaches and returns to Earth. Elon says this booster won’t come down easy like the Starship, he says that Heavy will come down like a javelin and actually be caught by the launch tower. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I’m stoked to see it happen. Meanwhile, the Starship hangs out in orbit, where it will meet up with a tanker ship that will refill the Starship fuel supply - the tanker is basically another Starship just full of rocket fuel instead of people and it will come back down and land after fueling. Then we fly to mars, like I said, about 6 to 7 months or travel time. The Starship lands on Mars, the same way that it does on Earth - glides in using fins and then fires the engines to flip and land vertically. Then after refueling on Mars with resources trucked over by previous Starship landings, the ship makes a direct return to Earth. This second liftoff is possible without the Super Heavy because the force of gravity on Mars is only 38 per cent as strong as it is on Earth, so there will be much less resistance for the Starship to fight against.

How about infrastructure though, like communications? Can we share the internet with Mars from Earth? Luckily, SpaceX already has that figured out. The Starlink satellite network is not only going to be the business model that pays for all of this Mars exploration to happen, but Starlink will also be crucial in maintaining interplanetary network connections. Basically, the plan is to launch a constellation of Starlink satellites around Mars, same deal as what we have in space here right now, it’s actually written into the Starlink terms of service right now that this network will be used on Starship transports and Martian colonies. Then according to Elon all we need is a big laser floating in Earth’s orbit that would blast signals to Mars orbit, there would need to be a few relay stations as well for when Mars is on the other side of the sun, but it all seems very easy to do.

Lastly, who makes the rules on the new planet, who’s in charge? Does Elon Musk automatically become God Emperor of Mars? Or Techo King of Mars? I imagine that is going to be a very hotly debated topic. The idea of Mars sovereignty has been examined in many science fiction works before, there’s Total Recall of course where Mars is home to rebels and mutants, Babylon 5 had an interesting take on Mars independance and separatism, the Expanse series of books and TV show imagine a future competition between nations of Earth and Mars. So, pretty much the only person that thinks forming a new government on Mars is going to go smoothly is Elon himself. And Elon’s vision is very simple, a small government that is run via direct democracy - short, comprehensible laws that are voted on directly by the people. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. 

It’s all some pretty fantastical stuff, right? I want to make the point again that this whole series of events right now is running on Elon Time. That means the absolute best case scenario possible to achieve. This probably won’t all happen according to plan, because just like we have right now with autonomous cars, there will be setbacks, there will be failures, there will be changes in plans. But I think at this point, most experts can agree that the wheels for this are already set in motion, and the city on Mars is inevitable at this point. It’s more a question of whether or not we get to see it all happen in our lifetime.