Can Elon and Trump Send Humans to Mars?
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Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Elon Musk podcast. This is a show where we discuss the critical crossroads that shape SpaceX, Tesla, X, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. I'm your host, Will Walden.

At President Trump's inauguration last night, Elon Musk and also President Trump both highlighted that they want to send humans to the surface of Mars within the next four years.

Now, Elon Musk has broad ambitions, grand ambitions to send people to the red planet. And he has since starting SpaceX. The first thing that he wanted to do when he first started SpaceX was build a rocket or buy a rocket, I should say, from Russia that would send just a plant to inspire people to visit the planet of Mars.

But that didn't go through. And then he started his own space company, SpaceX. And we all know the history of that. Now they're building a starship down at Starbase in Boca Chica, Starbase, Texas. And the thing is massive, 400 feet tall. It is built specifically to go to Mars.

It is built specifically to go to the moon. It's a deep space rocket. Now, it's also a low Earth orbit rocket, which will see it sending Starlink satellites to Earth orbit. So SpaceX can make trillions of dollars from the broadband satellites, but that will fund future Starship development. Now,

President Trump wants this to happen in his four-year term. Elon Musk has stated numerous times, back in 2022, actually, Elon had said that he wants to put boots on the surface of Mars by 2029. Is this a realistic goal for Elon? Is this a realistic goal for SpaceX? And also, is this a realistic goal for humanity? The furthest that we've been out in space is the moon.

12 people have stood on the moon, have done science on the moon, have dug holes in the moon, driven rovers, played golf, jumped around, fallen over, things that humans do on the moon. But we're going to be going back there for the Artemis missions. And NASA thinks the Artemis missions are an important factor for us as humanity to get to Mars.

Now, if that's the case, you know, NASA wants to send people to the moon in 2028, probably 2030-ish, probably is the best bet that we're going to be sending people back to the moon due to...

Budget constraints, scheduling. I mean, so let's just let's break this down a little bit. They're making spacesuits. Axiom is making spacesuits for this. Other companies are making the lunar outpost, which will be orbiting the lunar orbiter, which will be orbiting space.

the moon and they have to have a lander, right? So they have to have people that land on the moon, but they also have to have a big rocket to launch those people to the moon's orbit where they will, and that'll be on the SLS rocket. They'll be going to the moon's orbit from the SLS and joining up with SpaceX's starship in the orbit. And then SpaceX will lower them down to the surface of the moon where they will

Do science, discovery, all the things that we did before on the moon, they'll be doing them again. And there's a buggy that's going to be built as well. And it's in the process of being built right now, which will be pretty cool for people to move around on the moon. But what does that, how does that translate into Mars?

One of the things was we have to get people to Mars and get them home. So one of the things that we're going to be doing on the moon is trying to make in situ fuel for a lander. And in order to do that, you have to use ice, make it into hydrogen,

Make some liquid oxygen. And therefore, you make that out of the ice. You have a production facility up there where you make that into some rocket fuel and you get back into the moon's orbit and launch yourself back towards Earth. Is that realistic for people? Yeah.

To do that within the timeframe that Elon and Trump are in office? That's four years from now. Right now it's 2025. 2029 is when Elon wants to send people to Mars. And if we don't have the ability to do in situ fuel on the moon, there's no way as of right now that Elon and his crew have planned or have at least published plans

in any way, how they would get people back from the surface of Mars. Now they're still testing Starship. They just launched Flight 7 with a Block 2 Starship on top of a booster. The booster made it back to Starbase, totally fine, landed on the chopstick arms and can be refurbished. Not reflown yet. We don't think that this one's going to refly, but the ship itself, the Starship, deteriorated.

It blew up over the Indian Ocean. There is debris scattered for hundreds of miles. Now, the thing is, Starship doesn't have an eject mechanism either. And this isn't even the people Starship yet. This is the cargo Starship, which is specifically designed to just launch Starlink satellites into orbit.

So going for, and I'm not a hater here. I want this to be known that I'm not a hater of SpaceX. I spent over a year or about a year down at Starbase as an on the ground reporter on the side of the road filming Starship. I'm a huge fan of space exploration. I'm a huge fan of SpaceX. So don't get me wrong here. So when they're building these starships and they will build them very,

I mean, as far as rockets go, they built them extremely fast. They could build, you know, 10s, 15, 20 of them in a year. How many launches can they do a year? Well, that depends on how many accidents they have along the way. So because of this incident report that needs to be done because this starship blew up, it's going to possibly set them back a few months.

And every few months that they're set back, even though the rockets are ready, you know, pretty soon the rockets will be ready to fly. Elon Musk said about four weeks between the last flight, the flight seven and flight eight. He said about a month before the next hardware is ready. And I believe him. It'll be about a month before they get all the testing done. And they're in, they're tested. Most of it, the booster has been tested. The ship's been tested, uh,

already. So they're going to continue testing and move them down to the launch tower as soon as possible. Now, the FAA and the incident report, this is for current events. So we have to really think about what's happening right now and then think about what could happen for the next six months to a year before anything happens with Artemis or even getting Starlinks into orbit.

the Block 2 Starship, there was a leak of some sort and it exploded. Elon thought, thinks they can fix it out. There's going to be fire suppression systems added. There's going to be venting added. So there's a possibility that they'd fix this for the next flight. But if they don't, that would push them back a few more months too. And also this incident report is something that SpaceX does. So SpaceX,

figures out what happened to the Starship, exactly what happened to the Starship. No guessing. They figure out everything in fine, minute detail. They report it to the FAA. And if the FAA is okay with the result of that investigation, then the FAA will allow them to fly Starships again. Could the FAA put a lot of pressure on Starship and on Elon Musk and SpaceX? Yes, they could. With the Trump administration saying,

trying to, I wouldn't say dismantle these operations, but kind of tone it down a little bit so they can allow these launches to happen at a faster pace. The FAA might have to step back a little bit. And it depends on, you know, if there's executive orders issued or if Elon and company, because Elon's really close with the president.

Elon has Doge. Elon has in his pocket right now, the most wealthy person in the world is right next to the president. So back door deals going on. They talk a lot and I'm not, you know, it's not conspiracy. Make your next move with American Express Business Platinum. You'll get five times membership rewards points on flights and prepaid hotels booked on amextravel.com.

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I see stuff here. This is just what happens. They're people, you know, it's a job. So when people talk to other people and Elon's like, Hey, do you want to be the person that sends people to Mars? Do you want to be the president? Well, humans set foot on Mars. This'll go down in history for the rest of humanity. How can we get this done? How can we get these people to Mars on your term? Four years. They have four years to build a ship. They can send people to Mars and,

And they can survive everything from the Earth all the way to Mars. Can you build that ship? I believe SpaceX could do it. Is it going to take a lot of time? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. It's going to take a lot of time.

Can they send an uncrewed cargo mission within the next few years? Possibly. There's a window for them to open up travel in 2026. But if they miss that deadline in 2026 to send anything to Mars and Elon wants to send cargo to orbit Mars or possibly a few starships to land on Mars,

The next launch window is in late 2028 into early 2029. And if they miss that window, it's another 26 months. So if they don't do this, this is a rapid iteration of Starship. Four years of building this thing. It's been about 10-ish years. I'm going to this broad spectrum here. 10-ish years of them from the very beginning of like the planning stages of Starship until now.

Now we see physical starships launching. We see physical starships blowing up. We also see the booster not landing properly. We, you know, and this is early, early development right now too. So I'm not throwing any shade at these guys. And the, the fact that we're still in early development means if they have a hundred launches in a year, which Gwynne Shotwell said they have to do in order to be safe and

You know, they want to do thousands of launches to be safe in order for people to be inside of a starship. They haven't even launched a human starship yet. They don't, they can't even get the cargo starship right. Which isn't a bad thing because we all know it's iterative design and we just have to take that into consideration. Do I want them to do it? Absolutely. I want them to launch uncrewed ships.

in 2026. I want them, anything, they could send anything. It doesn't have to come back. You know, it doesn't have to come back to Earth. Because if they don't figure that part out, the coming back to Earth, but if they figure out how to launch and land something on Mars, it took NASA decades to figure out how to launch and land something on Mars successfully. And the way they did it, if you remember, they did it in numerous ways. If it was a small lander,

They surrounded it with basically lander bubble wrap. You know, there was a rover and it had balloons around it. And as it fell onto the surface of Mars, it bounced. And the balloons deflated, basically, when they came to a stop. And also the seven minutes of terror happened.

which was one of the rovers that had a sky crane. So it was a hovering sky crane that dropped the rover from chains, basically, and lowered it down to the surface of Mars. Now, can you get a 40-story building? Actually, it's a 25-story building. This is about 200 plus feet tall to land vertically on the surface of Mars with no landing gear.

Because right now Starship doesn't have landing gear. What they want to do is make an in-situ landing pad for Starship to land. There's no landing gear right now. We haven't seen any landing gear other than the moon variant, the lunar variant of Starship. And we haven't seen any indication that the Mars Starship would have any landing gear. So how are they going to do this by 2029? Because they're not going to build another, they're not going to build a tower on Mars.

Mars, of course. Could they build a land? Could they send things in this first cargo mission or the first cargo missions to make an in situ landing area for Starship on Mars? Could they just land on the rocky surface of Mars? There's the possibility. But how do they do that without damaging the rocket itself?

or the engines, because imagine those Raptor engines floating down to the surface of Mars. And as it's floating down, it's kicking up rocks and dust and debris. And those could kick up and destroy one of the engines. Those astronauts are stranded there forever. They would likely die on Mars. There's no coming back. There's no rescue missions when you go to Mars. You have to wait for the next launch window. And if you can't make it for the 26 months,

Watch the movie The Martian. That's very similar to what would happen. You'd have to use whatever tools you have available to you, or you have to use whatever food is available to you to grow more food. But if you can do uncrewed starships beforehand, you could make that a possibility. Now, there's so many logistics to do.

Could they send people around Mars in the time that Trump is in office? Four years for people to fly around Mars. Remember, the first flights around the moon weren't spectacular. There were just people in pods flying around the moon. The pods themselves flew around the moon just to see if it would work.

They're test pilots. These people, they're test pilots. The first people to fly around the moon, it's going to be a whole different situation than what happens at Mars. It takes months to get to Mars, six to nine months to get to Mars.

And therefore, six to nine months to get to Mars. And you also will do a flyby. You probably have a crew member or five crew members with you, four or five crew members with you. It's going to be a it's going to be a long trip. And could you imagine? Just think about this. You go on a road trip with your family and you're gone for, you know, maybe it takes you a day or two.

a day or two and, you know, you get to your destination and by that time you're exhausted, right? Like you get to the destination after two or three days of driving in a car, you're bored, you're exhausted, and you just want to chill for a little bit. You know, you're excited though, right? But imagine doing that for nine months. That's like staying in your room, your bedroom, because it's not going to be a big space. But think about that. Like, could you do it yourself? Astronauts do it on the International Space Station all the time. They spend about a year up there.

So could they spend nine months to get there and then nine months to get home? That's, you know, over two years. You know, it's around two years. So, yeah, it's going to be a it's going to be a tough one, like a year and a half in flight to go to Mars. And then you probably park in an orbit either A around the moon or B around Earth when you come back.

So you'd have to park in an orbit. And then because they're not going to have landing gear, they're not going to have any way for these people to land Starship unless they figure out a way for it to flip to the flip maneuver and land on the surface on the chopsticks, which they're working on. Elon says he wants to do it in the next few flights. So if they can figure that out and they can use a very dumped down version of a Starship to go to Mars with just a few portholes, then

You know, because what we see from the renders are huge windows on the nose cone. But that's not going to happen for the first flight. There's no way. They don't know how to do the technology for that yet. They're still working on that. They're working on all of this behind the scenes, but it hasn't been tested. And it won't be tested at least if they're going to be flying within four years. They have to test this for the 2026 flight.

So in about a year, they have to be able to fly a full starship with windows, you know, the full, the full thing where people will fly in it to Mars in order to test it, uh, just to send cargo there. And then by 2029, uh,

uh, 20, late 2028, 2029, they have to have a full rocket ready to go. Now, mind you, they can send things like the window is a window where it's the fastest to get there, right? They can send things before and after take a little bit longer to get there, but they could do it.

they could possibly do it. So it takes nine months to get there at the fastest six, nine months, the fastest time. And if it's not the fastest time or in the fastest window, that could be, you know, a year to get there. And that's, you know, that's still something that they should test for. And if they can launch

You know, they have two launch towers at Starbase. Pretty soon they're going to be, the second tower will be fully operational. And when it's fully operational, they will be able to launch two rockets. I'm assuming not simultaneously, but within a specific launch window of each other, probably within 24 hours of each other. So they'll be able to crank these things out at a phenomenal rate, have a

two or three launches per week at the best. I mean, that would be, that would be remarkable if they got to that point, making the Raptor engines, that's their choke point. If they can reuse the engines, you know, they're going to be able to reuse the boosters once they get that nailed and they can reuse every single booster, then it'll be just making ships and engines. So the boosters will be fine for 10 flights,

And making more ships is the, you know, is the, will be the choke point at that, at that time, because having the, the engines being reusable and the booster be reusable. And eventually the Starship being reusable, the top part that will be clutch in doing the testing that they need in order to fly people to Mars. Now, are they going to get to that in the next year so they can ship a cargo ship to the surface of Mars or around Mars orbit? No,

That's a wait and see kind of thing. They've caught two boosters. The first one they caught and they were, they said that their telemetry was off and their systems were off. Like some of the systems were like a little bit acting a little bit wonky.

So when they landed the first one, it wasn't 100% precise. They landed it, but they didn't land it super precise. The second one after that, the one after that, they had to ditch it into the Gulf of Mexico, which Trump is going to call the Gulf of America, apparently. And then the third one, they landed it on the booster catch arms. And then that's the one that the Starship blew up over the Indian Ocean. So

There's definitely precedent that the Starship booster has landed, the Super Heavy booster has landed twice. And that is huge as far as reusability goes. Now, if they can nail that within the next, you know, if they nail every single one for the next 10 flights and they start reusing boosters after the fourth attempt of landing, successful attempt at landing, I believe they could

start reusing these things after 10 flights. You know, I don't see a reason why not. As long as the engines are intact, they can refurbish the booster. They could reuse it. They could refly it. And then once they start catching starships too, there's a possibility that they can just reuse the same starship. They wouldn't reuse the same starship in order to go to Mars, of course, because they need kind of like, I mean, a flight tested starship is

is a tested Starship. It's like, it's a test drive for a car. You don't get a car off the lot without testing it and testing it. You have to drive it a little bit unless it's a, you know, a higher end car, but you get, they do have to do tests before you fly a rocket to Mars. So a flight tested rocket and a flight tested booster is,

Might be better than a brand new one that's never been tested before. And that's what they found out with Falcon 9 is that the flight proven boosters work just as good as a brand new one. And they're kind of hesitant. They're like, oh, I don't know, like an untested booster. We don't know if it's going to work. So the Starship, the tested Starship is probably going to be their first flight to Mars.

But I want to say thanks to everybody who's listening to this. And we have a Supercast that you can check out. And it's going to be in the link in the description below. There's a Discord you can join up to continue this conversation. I'm going to post this ad-free on Patreon and on Supercast2.com.

So please take a second and join both of those things to help with the cause of promoting this show. And also, if you're listening on YouTube, please give it a like and a subscribe. Helps out the algorithm. And I think that's it for today, everybody. Just want to get my thoughts out there about the Starship and Elon Musk, because there's some huge, huge news with the Trump administration coming into play that there's a possibility they could just...

throw all everything at Starship, like not government funding, but they could push, you know, government agencies to just let Elon and SpaceX do what they got to do, you know, relax some government stuff. So Elon can launch a hundred rockets in a year from Starbase. And also they're going to start building, they are building,

the infrastructure at Kennedy Space Center to launch more rockets. So if they could launch two starships from Starbase and then two starships from Kennedy Space Center, I mean, even one starship from Kennedy Space Center. So only have one tower there to begin with three rockets in a day. The FAA is going to be really busy. That's all I got to say. The government agencies have got to step it up. So Elon is ready to take the next step. Is humanity ready to take the next step?

I don't know. That's a question we all have to ask ourselves. All right. Thanks for listening, everybody. Take care of yourselves and each other, and I'll see you in the next one.

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