Most of Musk’s self-inflicted wounds are here on Earth. One still is at this moment but won’t be in the future if it goes the way Musk says it will. That wound is Musk wants to colonize Mars.
He really, really, really wants to colonize Mars. He wants to colonize it so much he’s projected he’ll be able to send a million people there. Why this is a self-inflicted wound is when he says it will happen.
The plan is simple. SpaceX develops a functional reusable rocket, it’s modified to hold 100 passengers, then you do 10,000 launches to get everyone there. Prior to people being on board, there will be unmanned flights to verify the ships can land on Mars and return. When they do, SpaceX will start doing tests with humans to make sure that goes well and start delivering cargo and Optimus robots to Mars on other flights. When those go well, Earth2Mars is go!
Musk first floated the colonization plan in 2001 so that if the Earth goes bye-bye or a big enough volcano pukes and sends the planet into a perpetual winter or Buy n Large creates so much waste from what they sell that the Earth turns into one big garbage dump, humans will survive on Mars.
Sound nice, right? Yeah. Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy.
There’s just seven teeny-tiny problems. reliability, timeline, training, infrastructure, poisonous and deadly conditions, economy, and promises.
1. Reliability
Starship in its current design (without the modifications for passengers) has had 11 launches since April 2023. Five had launch failures (45%), either with getting off the pad or not completing the full launch process. Other failures have been with the booster not being recoverable and with the entire ship landing.
Of the five flights in 2025 with the “Block 2” variant and Starlink “simulator” satellites payloads, only the last two have been complete successes. That seems really low for repeatability of success, yet the nine planned launches in 2026 will be with the “Block 3” variant that changes the configuration and materials. In a way, the successful repeatability counter is resetting back to zero because you can simulate things in a computer all you want, but until it becomes physical reality, you can’t know exactly how it actually performs.
2. Timeline
But let’s give SpaceX the benefit of the doubt and say the 2026 and beyond flights become reliable and don’t blow up or fail in any of the other ways they have so far. They work out the refueling process they need and they get the converter system established on Mars that will convert the atmosphere into fuel for all of the Starships zipping back and forth between here and there.
And let’s say building the spacecraft gets so efficient that the costs drop like they’re projecting and they can build one every day like they’re projecting. And let’s say that during the period of time when the Earth and Mars are closest together, which occurs every 26 months, they have really good weather and they don’t have to reschedule any flights.
If they had all that, if they did, the timeline to get the million people there is still really short. Musk says it will be done by 2050, just 25 years from now. It can be done, but it’s dependent on a lot of things working perfectly, such as getting to the point of being able to launch dozens or hundreds of spaceships at a time.
But even if everything worked perfectly, you’ve got the problem of transit time. Current estimates are it takes between five and eleven months to get to Mars when it’s closest to Earth, depending on whether you’ve got a lot of fuel to go faster or if you use the fuel-efficient route.
You remember those 100 people per ship that will be going? Don’t worry. Musk says the passenger section of each Starship will have room for all of them. And of course, it will have all the food, air, water, waste disposal/recycling and bathing facilities for the up to 11 months it takes to get to Mars. It will be like living on the U.S.S. Enterprise and definitely won’t be like living on a Boeing 747 for that long.
3. Training
In order for Mars to become a self-sustaining colony, the people going there will have to have training. You’ve got the training for going to space, dealing with emergencies during flight, effecting repairs, and training on how to deal with 99 other people cooped up inside the spaceship with you for an extended period of time when you can’t take a walk to blow off steam or retreat into a holodeck. Maybe there will also be training on how to make sure you’re taking the correct dosage of happy pills and what to do when your tolerance to them starts increasing.
But let’s say everyone makes it with their sanity more or less intact and there were no instances of anyone mysteriously dying in their sleep because they were snoring too loud or snapping their gum. Everyone on the trip needs training on how to create the colony using the materials and machines shipped there. This isn’t going to be a luxury cruise where only some of the people do the work while everyone else kicks back in a lounge chair with a piña colada waiting for their house to be built.
The U.S. is already undergoing a shortage of workers to do some types of work like farming and construction. Is Musk going to be able to find a million people that will work?
4. Infrastructure
A big thing that’s glossed over when talking about colonizing Mars is infrastructure. This isn’t just living quarters and food like most people think it will be. It’s all the support systems that go with it. Hospitals with family birth facilities and the diagnostic equipment in them like X-ray, MRI, CT, Ultrasound and other scanners, clothing manufacturing, recreational facilities, transportation, an electrical grid with power plants, and so on.
All of that has to be shipped from Earth to Mars. Anything that’s going to be manufactured from resources on Mars requires the equipment and processes to do so shipped there as well.
Not enough people are talking about the tremendous amount of resources here on Earth that will go into building the spacecraft and have to accompany the people going there. All of those resources will not go towards fixing problems here.
5. Poisonous and deadly conditions
Despite what the novel The Martian and its movie say, you can’t grow crops in Martian soil. It has perchlorates that would make anything grown in it poisonous. You’d have to have equipment to remove them from the soil before it could be used, or else ship tons of dirt from Earth for farming on Mars.
Mars doesn’t have the same kind of magnetic field and atmosphere that Earth does, so there’s not much stopping radiation from reaching the surface. Every structure, every space suit, every vehicle and piece of equipment used on Mars has to be designed to withstand levels of radiation that would give you cancer in short order.
If you build underground habitats, that would shield you, but that’s a whole 'nother group of infrastructure items you need to build that way.
6. Economy
A colony on Mars will depend on the people there being able completely change their behavior and thoughts when it comes to an economy. What we have on Earth is an economy tied to money, with the value of the money determined by different factors such as being based on gold.
The colony would take a long time before there’s enough stuff there that people would look to assign a money value to that stuff. Before it got to that point, the economy has to be completely shifted to the work and the items being made are done for the benefit of everyone to help ensure the survival of everyone. That kind of economy is akin to socialism and/or communism. There haven’t been a lot of good examples of either of those in the past few centuries, and getting enough open-minded people to ship to Mars willing to embrace one or both is going to be tough.
7. Promises
Specifically, Musk’s promises. He doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to being able to do what he says he will. He over-promises constantly. He’s been promising full self-driving for Tesla vehicles for a decade, repeatedly saying it will be ready in just a few weeks or by the end of the year. And then January rolls around and he makes a new promise about when it will be ready.
If Musk cannot make good on this promise, which he is convinced is just a software problem at this point and not an insufficient amount of safety and detection hardware, how likely will all of his promises in the timeline of what SpaceX will do will actually come true? Will it be that same old song of “Tomorrow, you’re always a day away”?
Stay tuned for the next twenty-five years to find out.