In an interview with TV presenter Joe Rogan, the entrepreneur said that next year he would launch an unmanned version of Starship to Mars or even several. In addition, he spoke about the key areas of development in the company and how he sees the subsequent development of the Red Planet.
The head of SpaceX noted that the launch window for launching to Mars opens once every 26 months, the next one is November-December 2026. The default plan for this window is to send at least one Starship to the Red Planet, but preferably several at once. The key objectives of the mission are to test landing systems on Mars.
This is a very difficult step, because landing there is very different from returning to Earth, where Starship brakes on a dense atmosphere with its "belly", and from landing on the Moon, where there is no atmosphere at all, so there is no influence of its turbulence. The Martian gas envelope, on the one hand, is 160 times less dense than the Earth's, which makes it difficult to decelerate against it, on the other hand, it does not allow planning a purely "vacuum" landing.
Musk noted that sending several ships is desirable to ensure the safety of the final part of the flight to Mars. It is important to understand whether all of them will be able to sit flawlessly, or if some will malfunction. In the latter case, it is necessary to find out which element of the planting process should be improved.
The entrepreneur warned that there is not much time to create a self—sufficient colony on Mars - about the next 15 "windows" for a flight there (390 months, about a third of a century). According to Musk, this issue requires an urgent solution, since the death of modern civilization from various events — nuclear war and other threats - is possible.
Among them, he named demographic problems: with a serious population decline, the technological level of the Earth will fall below what is necessary to send ships to Mars, and civilization will simply "die in adult diapers," the billionaire added. Musk recalled that at the current level of reproduction, South Korea will lose 96 percent of its population in just three generations, and many countries may face a similar fate.
"Demographic collapse is coming fast, <...> it appears to be accelerating in many parts of the world," the businessman concluded.
Briefly, he repeated his plan for the development of the Red Planet: the delivery of a million tons of equipment from Earth and a million people there. Since terraforming would take a long time, the first settlers would live in domes or underground shelters.
But new theses have also appeared. Not so long ago, Musk said that the flight to Mars would take three months, but this time he announced about six. Apparently, his company has decided to switch to more fuel-efficient, but longer flight plans to the fourth planet.
In 2025, the entrepreneur said in an interview, SpaceX will most likely be able to land the Starship ship on the tower for the first time. And, if you're lucky with time, you'll even be able to launch into space again — although it may take a long time for inspection and minor repairs for the first time. Reuse of the first stage is possible much earlier, long before the end of 2025.
Musk also noted that the refinement of Starship is still far from over. He called the heat shield the most difficult remaining element. Unlike the heat shield of the Shuttles, all the hexagonal tiles of the Starship thermal protection are of the same composition — a mixture of glass fibers and artificial sapphire (aluminum oxide), laid in a certain order. This distinguishes SpaceX's solution from carbon-carbon tiles on the most heat-loaded parts of the Shuttle (at the edge of the wing), which split under the impact of mounting foam, which led to the death of one of the Shuttles and seven people on board.
But even in today's SpaceX tiles, the geometry of these fibers, their specific ratio, and the tile coating may vary, and the company is still working on these issues. However, Musk concluded, if some time ago he was not sure that they would be solved, today he believes that it will definitely succeed.
