The first Starship ships will launch to Mars in 2 years, when the next launch window opens, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on social media X.
They will be unmanned to ensure flight safety and the ability to land safely. If the flights are successful, the first manned expedition to Mars will take place in 4 years, he added. This was reported by Yelisey Khodolovsky.
Reducing the cost of flights
“From then on, the frequency of flights will increase exponentially, with the goal of building a self-sufficient city in about 20 years. Multi-planetry will significantly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer keep all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet,” Musk said.
Separately, he said that SpaceX has created the first fully reusable rocket stage and, more importantly, made reuse economically viable.
According to Musk, it currently costs about a billion dollars to deliver a ton of payload to the surface of Mars. To build a self-sufficient city there, this cost should be reduced to $100 thousand per ton.
For flights to Mars, Musk plans to use the Starship spacecraft, which was officially presented in February 2022.
“I have no doubt about the possibility of modifying the Starship so that it can fly to the Red Planet in automatic mode. The landing on Mars has already been done many times before Musk, for the first time it was done by Viking 1 when Elon was 5 years old,” Khodolovsky notes.
The problem of delivering people
The biggest challenge is getting people to Mars safely. Almost the entire flight will take place outside the Earth’s magnetosphere, and Mars does not have a magnetosphere.
This will mean that the crew will be exposed to galactic cosmic radiation throughout the flight, with periodic bursts of cosmic wind.
The dose that an astronaut can receive from cosmic radiation may be comparable to the dose received by the liquidators on the roof of Unit 4 during the Chornobyl accident or even exceed it.
“The Starship does not have full protection against cosmic radiation, which, as I wrote earlier, requires either a layer of water several meters thick or thick plates of heavy metals. None of this is available on Musk’s ship, because such heavy protection can only be mounted when the spacecraft is assembled in orbit,” the expert points out.
In his opinion, the maximum that Starship can have in terms of radiation safety is special rooms in which to take shelter during solar flares, where radiation particles will be partially shielded by boxes of scientific equipment and refrigerators with food. But these measures reduce the dose that the crew can receive only partially, and it will not stop particularly powerful particles coming from the depths of space.
Not to mention that no one will be able to stay in a shelter during the long months of the flight. Therefore, future suicidal colonists will be dead on the way to Mars, the expert adds.
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