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Talk of improving humanity set Elon Musk to roll out timelines for manned missions to Mars and a self-sustaining city and “Whoah, this is not one of those things happening in a couple decades.”

“This is happening in 4 years.”

Prior to then-President Donald Trump’s exploratory initiative “Space Policy Directive 1,” the Marxist retooling of NASA would have led one to believe the culture-focused agency’s acronym stood for “Not Another Space Adventure.” Now, as MAGA met MAHA and other auspicious promises to once again be that shining city on a hill, the SpaceX founder and CEO suggested astronauts could be landing on the red planet before the end of the next White House administration.

Prompted by a post from Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman who had shared a Make America Healthy Again ad, Musk briefly touched on some of the logistics as he explained, “The first Starships to Mars will launch in 2 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 will go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years,” he went on. “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.”

Ackman had initially shared an ad that promoted lifestyles diverging from synthetic options and expressed, “Let'[s] make America healthy again! Without our health and that of our children, we have nothing. And for those who care about our economy, national debt, and deficits, there is no more important initiative.”

To that, Musk had reacted “SpaceX created the first fully reusable rocket stage and, much more importantly, made the reuse economically viable. 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,” he added. “Extremely difficult, but not impossible.”

Before the end of his first term, Trump had set a goal to see American astronauts return to the moon by 2024 as part of the program dubbed Artemis with the challenge “to send the first woman and next man to the Moon within five years.”

Just prior to Vice President Kamala Harris being named chair of the National Space Council in May 2021, that mission was abridged earning it the moniker “Critical Space Theory” when the goal became to send a woman and, specifically, a person of color to the moon.

While the Artemis program had fallen short of returning to the moon under the Biden-Harris administration, Trump had previously marveled at Musk’s SpaceX advancements saying, “Now, if that were government, you wouldn’t see that for another 50-100 years.”

Such was the consensus when reactions to the timeline included one user writing, “Whoah, this is not one of those things happening in a couple decades,” as the billionaire responded, “Attempting to land giant spaceships on Mars will happen in that timeframe, but humans are only going after the landings are proven to be reliable. 4 years is best case for humans, might be 6, hopefully not 8.”

Kevin Haggerty
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