Elon Musk wants to put humans on Mars by 2030. Don’t count on it.

• Elon Musk set SpaceX’s timeline for taking humanity to Mars this week.
• He said SpaceX plans to send five Starship rockets to Mars in 2026, with crewed missions to follow two to four years later.
• Experts say SpaceX will face major engineering and regulatory challenges.

Elon Musk has set his latest timeline for getting humans to Mars, and experts say it’s a classic SpaceX move.

The SpaceX founder said in a recent post on X that the company plans to launch about five unmanned Starship rockets to Mars in 2026. Depending on the success of the unmanned missions, the first manned missions will be launched two to four years later.

Musk has previously set ambitious timelines for getting humanity to Mars. In 2016, he told the audience at a keynote speech in Mexico that manned missions to the Red Planet could begin as soon as 2022.

Unlike then, SpaceX now regularly delivers astronauts and cargo into orbit and has successfully tested Starship, the massive rocket Musk said he would use to travel to Mars.

Experts told Business Insider that SpaceX’s timeline is still ambitious and perhaps a little optimistic — but they said it’s consistent with the company’s method of setting ambitious goals that drive the industry forward, even if they don’t quite meet them.

“We’ve never been this close to sending people to Mars,” said Philip Metzger, a former NASA scientist and professor of Planetary Sciences at the University of Central Florida.

“I think Musk’s timeline will turn out to be a bit optimistic, but even with that in mind, we’re on the cusp of a new era,” he added.

Engineering challenges

The main challenge with any mission to Mars is timing. Space agencies schedule their missions in windows when Mars and Earth are closest — about every 26 months — to save fuel and money.

SpaceX plans to launch five unmanned Starship rockets to Mars in the first window in 2026, according to Musk.

Since the spacecraft uses most of its fuel to enter orbit, the giant spacecraft must be refueled in space to reach Mars.

Metzger estimated that each ship would require at least four refueling flights. This means that SpaceX will have to launch a lot of rockets in a very short period of time and perfect technologies such as Starship-to-Starship docking and fuel transfer between two spacecraft.

“The departure window to Mars is limited to about a month of planetary alignment,” Metzger said. “Musk plans to send five starships to Mars in the first cycle, so it will require about 25 launches in a short period.”

Discussing Musk’s plans in a post on X, astrophysicist and scientific software engineer Peter Hague said SpaceX wants to “take a Saturn V-class rocket that flies quarterly and make it fly weekly in two years.”

“I have no doubt they can fly something to Mars in that time frame, but they almost certainly won’t hit the target,” said Hague, who concluded that manned flights to Mars in 2031 or 2033 were a more realistic goal for SpaceX .

Bureaucracy is the biggest obstacle of all

Metzger said the biggest hurdle Musk will face in meeting his timeline may be dealing with regulators rather than technical hurdles.

“The biggest challenge will probably be getting approval to launch the mission from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA),” he said.

“The FAA is not used to working at such a fast pace, and it will be painful to get them to adjust. They have already struggled with environmental impact on Earth even with a very slow launch rate, and missions to Mars will introduce a new dimension. because it could have an impact on the Martian environment,” Metzger added.

Musk and SpaceX have already battled with regulators in recent weeks.

Musk has criticized the FAA for a proposed $633,000 fine and regulatory delays that have delayed the next Starship launch by two months.

Musk criticized the delay in a post on X, warning that “we’ll never get humanity to Mars” if these delays continue.

“I would argue that it’s less important if SpaceX gets to Mars with a crew in four to six years than that SpaceX actually tries to do it,” Matthew Weinzierl, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and an economics expert the space. said.

He added that much of SpaceX’s success came from setting such ambitious targets in short time frames.

“This kind of vision will continue to attract talent and capital to space, which will fuel countless innovations on the road to Mars settlement, most of which will primarily benefit those on Earth,” he added.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment outside normal business hours.