(This article appears in the current issue of the Blackbird Watch Manual)
It’s a destination that has long tantalised the imagination and inspired storytellers from H.G. Wells to Sir Ridley Scott. Welcome to Mars; up to 250 million miles from Earth, 13,000 miles in circumference, colder than the Antarctic, highly toxic upon exposure and – as far as we know – totally uninhabited. Space agencies have sent robots there before, but how far off is a manned mission beyond the Moon to Mars, and could humans one day colonise the red planet?
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are counting on it. The starting pistol (or should that be ray-gun?) has been fired.
THE NEW SPACE RACE
In his inaugural address this year, President Trump announced the United States’ ambition to send astronauts to Mars. Just as John F. Kennedy in 1962 proposed landing a man on the Moon before the end of that decade – which was successfully achieved by the Apollo 11 crew on July 20 1969 – Trump understands a Mars landing would be an historic and life-affirming moment in what he’s touting as a new “golden age” for America. It’s also in keeping with his controversial appetite for territorial expansionism. Both the USA and China are eying the mineral resources and strategic defence benefits of utilising, mining and ruling space.
And with Trump and Musk firmly in business together, for now at least, it’s fair to suggest the world’s richest man will hold Trump’s feet to the fire. As long as the president is convinced of ‘the ratings’, he’ll likely support it. Jared Isaacman, a private astronaut and fellow billionaire, is taking the helm of NASA under Trump, which will further embolden the agency’s ambition. NASA is non-partisan and operates independently from the federal US government, but its budget and programmatic policies are very much influenced by the political environment. Mars would be a glittering trophy for Trump which could add lustre to how scholars will sum him up in the history books. It could also further whatever political and commercial ambitions Musk has beyond SpaceX, Tesla, and the incipient US Department of Government Efficiency.
The last crewed mission to the Moon was Apollo 17 in 1972, yet there are plans to return in mid-2027 when the Americans will begin to establish a permanent base camp and fuel station while technology is developed for the onward march to Mars.
Laura Forczyk of Astralytical, a space industry analyst, says the only thing that’s holding the space race back right now is budget. “[We’re] closer than ever. Is it realistic we’ll have humans to Mars within this new Trump administration [which will end in 2029]? No. But we can start preparing in a way we’ve never done before.”
SpaceX is targeting 2029, nevertheless, starting with a crew of 12 astronauts but potentially carrying many more passengers thereafter. “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars,” declared Trump on January 20, “launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” Stood behind the president in the Capitol rotunda, SpaceX owner Musk burst into a grin and held up both thumbs.
But this ambition is nothing new. NASA has been pursuing the goal of human exploration of Mars since before it even stuck the US flag on the Moon. Lyndon B. Johnson, JFK’s successor, set America’s sights on Mars in response to the Soviets’ own Cold War ambitions. In total, there have been 27 successful or partially successful uncrewed missions to Mars, starting with NASA’s Mariner 4 ‘flyby’ spacecraft which sent the first images of Mars’ surface back to Earth in 1965. The USSR launched its first orbiter, Mars 2, in 1971, which crash-landed. NASA’s first lander, Viking 1, touched down on the red planet on July 20 1976, while its first rover – a vehicle that drives on the planet’s surface – landed in 1997. Since then, orbiters have been launched by the European Space Agency, Japan, India and the United Arab Emirates, while China’s CNSA touched down with lander/rover Tianwen-1 on May 14 2021. Four years later it is still operational and exploring the planet, sending back images and scientific data to Earth, as is NASA’s Perseverance rover, which is accompanied by a small robotic helicopter.
In recent years, the Chinese have had the jump on the Americans. In September last year, China announced it will launch a mission “around 2028” to retrieve the first surface samples from Mars and transport them back to Earth by the end of 2030. This follows China’s landmark success in retrieving the first samples from the dark side of the Moon in June 2024. To bring rocks and soil from Mars would be a major accomplishment, and our best opportunity yet to discover whether there are signs of life. Leader Xi Jinping has stated that China becoming a space power is the “eternal dream.”
China has set its goal for an inaugural manned Mars mission in 2033, so the race between the superpowers is on. Both nations are planning to build bases on the Moon and Mars.
SPACEX’S STARSHIP
Currently undergoing test flights, Starship is SpaceX’s proposed fully-reusable launch vehicle. Taking off from Boca Chica, Texas, the giant rocket consists of a super-heavy first stage booster and a Starship second stage spacecraft, powered by Raptor and Raptor Vacuum engines that produce roughly 7,590 tonnes of thrust, or 40.8 million horsepower. Methane was chosen for the Raptor engines because it is relatively inexpensive, produces a low amount of soot compared to other hydrocarbons, and can be created on Mars from carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
In September 2024, the company announced it will launch its first uncrewed missions to Mars in two years, aligning with the next Earth-Mars transfer window. Musk shared on his social platform X that the first five missions will focus on testing the reliability of landing Starships intact on Mars. If successful, SpaceX plans to begin crewed flights to Mars in about four years. Crews will comprise 12 astronauts with goals to “build out and troubleshoot the propellant plant and Mars Base Alpha power system” and establish a “rudimentary base.”
CHINA’S LONG MARCH 9
China’s super-heavy carrier rocket is in its ninth iteration and has been in development since 2016. Built by the CNSA (China National Space Administration) and CAST (China Academy of Space Technology), it shares genealogy with Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft and is of a similar configuration to the SpaceX Starship. Its first manned flight is planned for 2033. The reusable first stage rocket is powered by 30 YF-215 engines burning methane and liquid oxygen and delivering 6,000 tonnes of thrust, while the second and third stages add another 600 tonnes of thrust, and long term plans exist to also make these subsequent stages reusable.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE?
At its closest, Earth is 140 million miles from Mars. The window of opportunity to send humans between the planets opens only once every 26 months and lasts five weeks, due to the planets’ relative positions to each other. It’d take around nine months to reach by the latest rocket. And, of course, to live and work on Mars will require considerable logistics and engineering, starting with oxygen, sustainable food, water sources, power and communications. Habitats may be constructed in future, but to go outside will require everyone to wear spacesuits to stay alive. SpaceX’s Starship is still at the experimental stage, and yet to reach an orbital trajectory or demonstrate it can be refuelled in-flight. Meanwhile, the Long March 9 is still years off the test flight stage.
There’s a whole lot more work that needs doing before there are footprints in the red desert dust. As Casey Dreier, senior space policy advisor at the Planetary Society has said: “The Moon is hard. Mars is a million times harder. It’s fantastically further away, we don’t know how to land there yet alone come back, and we don’t have the technology to sustain human life there for long. There are psychological consequences, health consequences from being in deep space that long. None of these are insurmountable, but it’s about much more than launching rockets. Launch is the easy part.”
There are no guarantees of survival. Radiation exposure, equipment failure and the brutal realities of the Martian atmosphere could all prove preventative, and many of the technological solutions do not yet even exist. What’s more, in January this year, one of SpaceX’s Starship rockets dramatically disintegrated over the Caribbean after launching from Texas. It was blamed on an oxygen and fuel leak. It was unmanned, but it’s this type of rocket which Musk hopes will soon be sending souls to the Moon and Mars.
THE ELON
“The audacity of trying to land humans on Mars,” says Dreier, “is one that will provide lots of scientific and social benefits… a unifying experience. But approach it with some level of humility. You can’t just will your way to Mars.”
Humility isn’t a word that often applies to Elon Musk, or Donald Trump for that matter. However, the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who went from designing rockets for the Nazis to running NASA for the Americans during its most glorious years, wrote a technically-detailed science-fiction book titled Marsprojeckt in 1949 while serving with the US Army at Fort Bliss, Texas. Set in the future, in the 1980s, it describes the first human mission to Mars and their encounter with benevolent, indigenous Martians. Von Braun hoped the book would “stimulate interest in space travel.” However, it sat unpublished until 2006. How many of his predictions (subterranean beings of humanoid appearance, an ancient ‘super-civilisation’, and technology far in advance of our own) will turn out to be accurate remains to be seen. Yet one thing may prove a manifest destiny: The name von Braun gave his Martian leader was ‘the Elon.’
“Honestly, a bunch of people will probably die in the beginning,” said Musk in 2021, making reference to an advertisement Ernest Shackleton posted for a crew of fellow Antarctic explorers a century ago, which read: ‘Men wanted for hazardous journey. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.’ “It’s dangerous, it’s uncomfortable, it’s a long journey. You might not come back alive,” said Musk. “But it’s a glorious adventure.”
A HUMAN COLONY
During one of Trump’s election rallies last year, Musk, who publicly stated his goal of colonising Mars as far back as 2007, jumped up and down on stage while wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with ‘Occupy Mars.’ SpaceX plans to build a ship that could take up to 100 people to Mars at a time, in order to establish a base for human settlement that could be self-sustaining by 2050. “The base starts with one ship, then multiple ships, then we start building out the city and making the city bigger; over time, terraforming Mars and making it a really nice place to be,” said Musk. That is a vision that’ll require trillions of dollars, which is a tall order even when federal budgets are combined with the fortunes of Musk and fellow billionaire boys’ club member Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin.
Musk, 53, foresees a million people living on Mars during his lifetime. The idea of a Mars colony is not a new one. Cecil Rhodes spoke about a desire to annex Mars in 1902. When a Dutch entrepreneur announced plans in 2012 to establish a permanent human colony, reactions ranged from outright dismissal to fascinated curiosity. Bas Landorp’s Mars One project was ridiculed as a “suicide mission” by scientists and engineers, who pointed out that the lack of infrastructure and critical technology made it pie in the sky. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, Mars One eventually went bankrupt with nothing to show for it. Yet 2,761 people applied for the opportunity to become Martian pioneers, unconcerned that Landorp had no plans for a return leg. It was, the Dutchman promised, “the next giant leap for mankind. It doesn’t matter who does it first; it will happen. It will change the world completely. People will believe that anything is possible.”
Musk envisages a Mars colony being a self-sustained large-scale settlement claiming self-determination and under direct democracy. The main motivation behind this is the belief that it will secure the long-term survival of the human species in case Earth is no longer habitable for our population of eight billion people, which is expected to grow by another two billion in the next 30 years. Once infrastructure is established on Mars, populating can begin via the birds and the bees; a human presence that will grow over time.
THE FINAL FRONTIER
A critic may point to the James Bond movie Moonraker, where space industrialist and billionaire baddie Hugo Drax wishes to repopulate humanity with a genetically perfect master race (until 007 shoots and ejects Drax into space). The parallels between Drax and Musk are both amusing and cautionary. Respected scientists such as Lord Martin Rees and George Dvorsky have described Musk as “dangerously deluded” and “stupendously unreasonable.” Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos has called Musk’s plans a “Plan B” for mankind, suggesting we’d do better to preserve the Earth by moving our heavy industrial activity into space rather than the population.
Ultimately, how much fun would it be to live on Mars? Imagine Earth after a nuclear apocalypse, but worse. To be a planetary pioneer and plant one’s flag on Mars would be a thrill that’d surpass perhaps any other in the human history. The hazardous journey would be in the spirit of Shackleton. It would be a truly glorious adventure, for a bit, anyway. Most of us may wish for the promise – even if it cannot be guaranteed – of a return ticket.
