{"id":46482,"date":"2026-07-11T18:15:02","date_gmt":"2026-07-11T10:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/elon-musks-mars-illusion\/"},"modified":"2026-07-11T18:15:02","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T10:15:02","slug":"elon-musks-mars-illusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/elon-musks-mars-illusion\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk\u2019s Mars illusion"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Elon Musk takes a bow at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in May 2020 after the launch of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission, which carried two astronauts to the International Space Station, about 250 miles up, and a world away from Mars. (GeekWire Photo \/ Kevin Lisota)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ever since its founding, SpaceX has fixed upon a single idea: Elon Musk\u2019s vision of colonizing Mars. Everything the company does is geared to that foundational goal.<\/p>\n

Two years ago, Musk posted on X that there could be a city on Mars within 20 years, \u201cbut for sure in 30.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCivilization secured,\u201d he added, implying that even if our troubled lives here on Earth come to some catastrophic end in the coming decades, don\u2019t worry, humans will endure on Mars.<\/p>\n

Musk\u2019s initial steps toward this ambition have produced awesome engineering successes. People have never seen the likes of the light displays that shower across night skies from SpaceX\u2019s rockets and satellites. They watched astounded in late 2024 when the gigantic Starship\u2019s booster rocket first descended gently to nestle into enclosing mechanical arms at the launch site in Texas.<\/p>\n

Yet the work of scientists studying Mars suggests that it\u2019s far-fetched, perhaps delusional, to think a human colony could be established there. You don\u2019t need to be a billionaire or a rocket scientist to realize Musk\u2019s timeframe is certainly a fantasy; there won\u2019t be a city on Mars in his lifetime or that of his children or his grandchildren. Think many, many decades at best. But more likely, never.<\/p>\n

Retail investors rushed to buy SpaceX stock after the IPO in June. Though the share price has already fallen back below where it was that day, many see it as a long-term investment. The reality is that the improbability of the Mars project shadows SpaceX\u2019s long-term future.<\/p>\n

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SpaceX\u2019s Starship, the rocket Musk is counting on to reach Mars, lifts off in a test flight in Texas in 2024. (Steve Jurvetson \/ CC BY 2.0)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While humans will at some point likely overcome the massively daunting engineering and logistics challenges of getting to Mars and even staying for some time, there\u2019s no technology available to form a permanent settlement there.<\/p>\n

Musk may be excused as being playful with his time scale.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, Elon is famously bad at giving time estimates,\u201d said Erika DeBenedictis, a biological engineer and Mars scientist, founder of Pioneer Labs, which is researching how to grow plants on Mars. \u201cThings always take longer than he says, but they do tend to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Musk has been quite specific. Last year, he said SpaceX had a 50:50 chance of sending its first uncrewed Starships toward Mars in 2026, with crewed landings to follow \u201cas soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely,\u201d he posted on X.  <\/p>\n

Then, this February, he said SpaceX would build a city on the moon first and start building a Mars city \u201cin about 5 to 7 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

While his targets and timing keep moving, the problems go deeper than that. The question is not when humanity will expand beyond Earth, but whether it ever will.<\/p>\n

Establishing a city on Mars depends crucially on a concept called \u201cterraforming,\u201d which means physically transforming the planet\u2019s surface environment into something resembling that of Earth, at least partially hospitable for humans.<\/p>\n

To DeBenedictis, the sterile science fiction notion of people confined inside glass domes, looking out upon a forbiddingly bleak landscape and living off protein shakes and dried food, is deeply unappealing. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t want it and I wouldn\u2019t want it for my daughter,\u201d she said. \u201cIt just seems terrible.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt doesn\u2019t have to be that way,\u201d she adds. \u201cI want the planet to be green.\u201d<\/p>\n

DeBenedictis concedes at the outset of an interview that this is \u201cprobably impossible,\u201d though in the tone of someone who lives to chase the impossible.<\/p>\n

In contrast, Musk glibly mentions terraforming as if it were within reach. In truth, science has only highly conjectural ideas about how it might be done. The hypothetical options scientists are researching now, if they work at all, will take many decades if not centuries to make Mars habitable. And they may never work.<\/p>\n

A titanic ambition<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Despite this, investment bankers and those with pre-IPO access were primed to ride the coattails of Musk\u2019s colossal wealth for a big payout on SpaceX\u2019s Wall Street launch day. Musk supercharged the June IPO by absorbing his xAI project into SpaceX. The IPO filing positioned xAI as a $26.5 trillion market opportunity, dwarfing all the other business segments of SpaceX, which the filing pegged at a mere $2 trillion. What\u2019s an IPO without a transcendent AI promise these days?<\/p>\n

The controversies around Musk\u2019s politics and conduct \u2014 his embrace of President Trump and other authoritarian leaders, his incendiary rhetoric, his reposting on his X platform of right-wing influencers agitating around immigration and race, his eager wielding of a chainsaw to U.S. government services \u2014 were set aside by investors as they scrambled to buy in.<\/p>\n

Wall Street weighed only Musk\u2019s entrepreneurial success and his ability to conjure the future and spin financial dreams. The Economist<\/em> in May called Musk\u2019s risk-taking and mobilizing of resources \u201ccapitalism at its most remarkable.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Wall Street, that made the SpaceX IPO a surefire winner. The share price duly rocketed up and made Musk briefly a trillionaire. Though he lost that status when the share price subsequently slid, he\u2019s still by far the richest man in the world with a net worth into the $900 billions.<\/p>\n

That fortune is built upon the market perception that Musk can turn dreams into reality. Mass-producing all-electric, virtually self-driving cars was once a pipedream. Rockets landing on their tails graced the covers of 1950s science fiction novels. By force of will, Musk made both a reality. Whatever pipe he\u2019s smoking now, shouldn\u2019t we give his Mars dream some healthy respect?<\/p>\n

That dream is specified precisely on the SpaceX website: \u201cA permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.\u201d<\/p>\n

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A SpaceX facility in Redmond, Wash., where the company designs and builds its Starlink internet satellites. (GeekWire Photo \/ Alan Boyle)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Musk designed the huge Starship rocket to go to Mars. And when Musk first unveiled his plan for the internet satellite venture that became Starlink in Seattle more than a decade ago \u2014 the satellites are made in Redmond \u2014 he told Bloomberg Businessweek he saw it as \u201ca long-term revenue source for SpaceX to be able to fund a city on Mars.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nearer term, SpaceX is to provide the lunar lander for NASA\u2019s Artemis project that should return humans to the moon within a few years and lay the groundwork for a permanent moonbase; Musk sees it as a stepping stone to the true goal.<\/p>\n

The problem is, Mars is not even remotely habitable. It\u2019s deathly cold. There\u2019s nothing on the surface but dust and rocks, in places some deeply frozen CO2<\/sub>. Regular dust storms whip the surface. The planet has zero vegetation; not a tree, not a leaf, not a blade of grass. The oxygen-free Martian air is unbreathable.<\/p>\n

Venture outside without a space suit and you\u2019ll die within a minute in the poisonous, low-pressure atmosphere. During unpredictable solar flares, cosmic radiation is a separate threat to life.<\/p>\n

Martian gravity, one-third of Earth\u2019s, may deform the human body over time. Astronauts on the zero-gravity International Space Station must work out constantly to retain muscle strength. Even then, if they spend too long in space they must be carried from the space capsule after splashdown.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t see any prospect for there to be permanent settlements,\u201d said senior NASA astrogeophysicist Chris McKay, who for more than 40 years has studied the possibility of supporting human life beyond Earth, and on Mars specifically. \u201cWhy would anybody want to live there?\u201d<\/p>\n

Bruce Jakosky, professor emeritus at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who has studied Mars his entire career since he worked on the Mars rover Viking mission in the mid-1970s, says he thinks it will happen someday, but adds, \u201cI have no idea when or how.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s far enough into the future that, once you get beyond, say, 30 years, you can\u2019t tell the difference between that and infinity into the future,\u201d Jakosky said.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s scientific realism. Buzz Lightyear talks about getting to infinity and beyond, but he\u2019s a toy.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s really achievable on Mars<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Despite the cold facts, Musk has so successfully sold the notion that if he put out a call for volunteers for the first Starship mission to Mars, hundreds of space scientists, enthusiasts, adventurers and Musk fanbros would eagerly sign up.<\/p>\n

Indeed, he already has a Mars mission volunteer. On the launch webcast of SpaceX\u2019s latest and largest Starship rocket in late May, a presenter introduced cryptocurrency billionaire and civilian astronaut Chun Wang, revealing that he\u2019s been tapped to lead the first crewed flyby mission to Mars at some unspecified future date \u2014 a round trip of about two years, going there and back without landing on the surface.<\/p>\n

And yes, it\u2019s inevitable humans will get to Mars one day. Crewed spacecraft may land on Mars within a couple of decades.<\/p>\n

The first astronauts to land will plan to explore the surface and hopefully return in triumph two years later, the next occasion when the Mars solar orbit again aligns with Earth. DeBenedictis dismissively describes this as the \u201cexpensive camping trip\u201d phase of exploration, \u201cmostly for the photo opp.\u201d<\/p>\n

Decades from now, humans may take a much harder, more substantive step: establishing a scientific base on Mars; we have such bases in Antarctica today. Researchers could rotate in and out every couple of years.<\/p>\n

Creating a permanent colony on Mars is something far different. It implies lifetime commitments and subsequent generations growing up and building their lives there. As Elton John sang, \u201cMars ain\u2019t the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it\u2019s cold as hell. And there\u2019s no one there to raise them if you did.\u201d<\/p>\n

A child born on Mars \u2014 a Martian! \u2014 would likely adapt to the low gravity as it developed. We have zero data on the physical consequences. Such a child could grow up so different in muscular and skeletal strength that he or she would be unable to walk on Earth.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first mothers that give birth will be guinea pigs,\u201d said NASA\u2019s McKay.<\/p>\n

And yet, Musk has laid out a plan he insists can establish a human colony on Mars within his lifetime. After Optimus humanoid robots designed by Tesla do some advance exploring on the Martian surface, eventually \u201ca few thousand\u201d Starship rockets will head off together from Earth orbit to Mars, loaded with people and more than a million tons of equipment, dried food and supplies.<\/p>\n

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