Elon Musk’s Mars Dream: Human Arrival In 4 Years, Self-Sustaining City In 20

Elon Musk on Saturday revealed the timeline for SpaceX‘s Mars mission, confirming that he intends to build a self-sustaining city on the red planet in 20 years. This comes as the tech billionaire’s space company created the first fully reusable rocket stage. Musk announced the development on X, platform formerly known as Twitter, saying: “Making life multiplanetary is fundamentally a cost per ton to Mars problem.”

“It currently costs about a billion dollars per ton of useful payload to the surface of Mars. That needs to be improved to $100k/ton to build a self-sustaining city there, so the technology needs to be 10,000 times better. Extremely difficult, but not impossible,” Elon Musk further added.

The Tesla boss further added that the first Starships to Mars will launch in two years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens. “These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years,” he tweeted.

The endpoint of Musk’s Mars dream is building a self-sustainable city.

“Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years. Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet,” he said.

Why Mars?

SpaceX states that Mars, at an average distance of 140 million miles, is one of Earth’s nearest habitable neighbors. While it’s about 50% farther from the Sun than Earth, it still receives sufficient sunlight.

“It is a little cold, but we can warm it up. Its atmosphere is primarily CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements, which means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere. Gravity on Mars is about 38% of that of Earth, so you would be able to lift heavy things and bound around. Furthermore, the day is remarkably close to that of Earth,” the company adds.