SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said to himself on Tuesday, December 1 " very confident " about the possibility of a first manned trip to Mars in 2026. He also adds that with a little luck, the milestone could even come as early as 2024.
Since 2002, the SpaceX company has come a long way. If the beginnings were a little chaotic, the company founded by Elon Musk has since succeeded in shaking up the space industry thanks to its reusable boosters . Now more competitive than ever, Falcon 9 rockets deliver satellites into orbit, but also ferry cargo and astronauts to the ISS. The logical continuation ? Manned trips to the Moon and to Mars. It is this ambition that motivated the creation of the company a little less than twenty years ago:to make Man a multi-planetary species.
With that in mind, SpaceX is developing two huge machines:the Starship and the Super Heavy . The first is a gigantic fifty-meter high reusable spacecraft currently under development at the company's South Texas facility in Boca Chica. The second is a super heavy booster (hence its name), also under development. Once the Starship is capped on, this rocket should be nearly 122 meters high , unheard of.
Timeline-wise, Elon Musk recently said that SpaceX is on track to launch its first uncrewed mission to Mars "in just four years" , thus taking advantage of an open launch window in 2024. A very ambitious deadline which would then fall the same year as that bringing American astronauts back to the Moon, as part of the Artemis program.
That said, Elon Musk seems to project himself more. Asked this Tuesday, December 1 by Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the German media company Axel Springer SE, the founder of SpaceX said he was indeed “ very confident ” about the possibility of a first manned trip to Mars as early as 2026 , adding that the milestone could come as soon as 2024, " if we're lucky" .
The two protagonists met at Axel Springer's headquarters in Berlin (Germany) as part of a ceremony in honor of Musk, who has just won the award Axel Springer. This annual prize is awarded each year to “ exceptional, particularly innovative personalities, who generate and change markets, and influence culture ” .
Previous winners of this prestigious award (no cash) include Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos (2018), inventor of the World Wide Web Timothy Berners-Lee (2017), and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (2016).
Finally, note that during this webcast interview, Musk reiterated his desire to want to die on Mars. “But not by crashing into it” , he joked.
