SpaceX's First Crewed Mars Mission Could Launch as Early as 2024, Elon Musk Says
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:
SpaceX's 1st crewed Mars mission could launch as early as 2024, Elon Musk says:
Company founder and CEO Elon Musk said on Tuesday (Dec. 1) that he's "highly confident" SpaceX will launch people toward the Red Planet in 2026, adding that the milestone could come as early as 2024 "if we get lucky."
Musk made the remarks during a webcast interview with Mathias Dopfner, CEO of the German media company Axel Springer SE. The two spoke at Axel Springer's Berlin headquarters as part of a ceremony honoring Musk, who won this year's Axel Springer Award.
"And then we want to try to send an uncrewed vehicle there in two years," Musk told Dopfner. (The two-year target intervals are dictated by orbital dynamics: Earth and Mars align favorably for interplanetary launches just once every 26 months.)
[...] The vehicle that will make these Mars trips is the 165-foot-tall (50 meters) Starship, which will launch from Earth atop a giant rocket known as Super Heavy. Both of these craft will be fully and rapidly reusable; Super Heavy will return to Earth for vertical touchdowns shortly after liftoff, and Starship will be able to fly from Earth orbit to Mars and back again many times, Musk has said. (Starship will be powerful enough to launch itself off both Mars and the moon, which have much weaker gravitational pulls than that of Earth.)
SpaceX is iterating toward the final Starship via a series of prototypes, the latest of which, SN8 ("Serial No. 8"), is gearing up for a big test flight. SpaceX aims to launch the three-engine SN8 to a target altitude of 9 miles (15 kilometers) this week, Musk said recently.
[...] The final Starship will sport six of SpaceX's powerful new Raptor engines, Musk has said. Super Heavy will sport about 30 Raptors.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.