Elon Musk Promises Mars Trip in 2026 in Tweets

Elon Musk has boldly predicted that SpaceX will launch their first mission to Mars in 2026.

He took to X to promise that the next Earth-Mars window would be the opportunity to send an uncrewed craft to Mars and in his words “test the reliability of landing in tact”.

SpaceX recently proved the concept of being able to fly any return to earth safely, and many seem to think that it is an ambitious timescale. In fact, in 2016 Musk had promised SpaceX would launch its first Mars cargo missions in 2022 and the first crews to the planet in 2024. 

This time he has promised uncrewed missions in 2026 and then 2028 for the crewed flights. Musk has been quoted as saying that he sees humans as becoming an interplanetary species in his lifetime and even promised to colonise Mars. He has speculated that there could be functioning settlements on Mars in as little as 20 years.

Aiming For the Earth-Mars Window

The Earth-Mars window is a logical time for the launch of the craft. This is the time at which the two planets are closely aligned (relatively speaking) in their orbit. This comes around roughly every 26 months and the next window is in 2026.

The timeline for SpaceX to achieve this could be challenging. The company has performed four rocket test flights since April 2023 and only recently managed to make splashdown successfully, returning the Starship to the Indian Ocean.

Musk said earlier this year that he hopes to launch Starship six times this year and it seems inevitable that there will be another test this year. SpaceX will look to recover both the rocket stages in the future missions as another step toward reusability.

Musk reiterated his desire to make this mission a regular occurrence as the technology becomes cheaper:

“Making life multi-planetary is fundamentally a cost per ton to Mars problem. 

It currently costs about a billion dollars per ton of useful payload to the surface of Mars. That needs to be improved to $100k/ton to build a self-sustaining city there, so the technology needs to be 10,000 times better. Extremely difficult, but not impossible.”

Whether the 2026 window is possible or not remains to be seen, but a mission to mars may finally be on the cards in the coming years.