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For something as serious as a mission to move life to Mars, Elon Musk is throwing around his estimations rather willy-nilly.
On Monday, Space_Hub, a Twitter account that posts about space and astronomy, tagged Musk and asked him to fill in the blank of when he thinks humans will be able to land on Mars.
Two days later, Musk tweeted his guess, which it seems the world is now using as the new official estimate for when he hopes to take a crewed mission to Mars.
Take a look if all of that sounds a little too cryptic:
2029
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 16, 2022
So 2029 it is then, and not 2024, or even 2026, as Musk has previously guesstimated, per NPR:
“It’s something we can do in our lifetimes [travel to Mars],” he told an audience of 100,000 watchers at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. “You could go.”
But Musk’s older predictions don’t necessarily match up with his latest. In 2016, he told the Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, that getting a “meaningful number of people” on Mars was possible “in about 10 years, maybe sooner, maybe nine years.”
CNET reported that since then, the “company has made a lot of progress in building its Mars rocket, but not quite fast enough to meet that initial timeline.”
SpaceX’s Starship, designed to take astronauts to the moon for NASA and eventually to Mars, hasn’t even made it into space yet.
Although, it has managed a few successful high-altitude flights.
Musk seems to be blaming federal launch regulations for slowing the process of reaching Mars, and recently even threatened that his company could become bankrupt if Starship’s raptor engines aren’t produced quickly enough.
Ultimately, getting to Mars includes numerous incredibly difficult hurdles to overcome before becoming a possibility, which scientists and astronomers outside of SpaceX have challenged Musk on over the years.
It also takes an intense amount of planning:
As Mars and Earth move around the sun, the two planets move closer to one another and then farther away again. To take advantage of the times when the trip between the two worlds is shortest requires launching during certain windows.
The ideal Mars launch windows for this decade are later this year, late 2024, late 2026 and late 2028/early 2029.
What’s more, the war in Ukraine has also put a spanner in the works for a possible Mars mission.
A joint Europe-Russia mission to Mars, called ExoMars, designed to investigate whether there is or ever was life on Mars, was just suspended, aligned with the sanctions imposed on Russia.
Even though space travel has been all the rage lately, commercial expeditions to the red planet will have to be put off for a while longer.
We will have to take Musk’s Twitter word for it.
