SpaceX To Attempt Human Landing On Mars In Next 4-6 Years

CEO and founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk has always been open with his ideas and plans about humans on Mars. He floated the idea of humans landing on Mars again during an interview recently. 

Media giant Axel Springer gave an award to Elon Musk on Tuesday and Musk gave a wide-ranging interview. He expressed his “highly confident” belief that by 2026, SpaceX will launch people towards the red planet. He also said that if lucky, this can happen as early as 2024.

Apart from mission Mars, Musk also discussed topics like space, Tesla, AI, and even underpopulation. Let’s see what else our dynamic Tesla CEO said during this interview!

The Axel Springer Award

The interview was held with Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the German media company Axel Springer SE at Axel Springer’s Berlin headquarters. The interview was part of a ceremony honoring Elon Musk with this year’s Axel Springer Award. 

The Axel Springer Award, as the company representatives write in its description, is a “prestigious prize without prize money”.

The personalities who often win this award are “particularly innovative, and who generate and change markets, influence culture and at the same time face up to their responsibility to society.”

Before Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, World Wide Web inventor Timothy Berners-Lee and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have won this award.

The Interview

Apart from expressing his confidence in Mission Mars, Musk also said that Tesla, his electric-car company will introduce a fully autonomous driving capability next year.

But let’s focus on the Mars dream here, shall we? The vehicle that will help carry out the Mars trips is the 165-foot-tall (50 meters) Starship. The Starship will launch from Earth atop Super Heavy, a giant rocket.

Musk said that shortly after liftoff, Super Heavy will return to Earth for vertical touchdowns, and Starship will be able to fly from Earth orbit to Mars and back again many times.

Musk’s Dream of Human Landing On Mars

Mars has become one of the most known and ardent dreams of Elon Musk and he often talks about how SpaceX is trying to make this possible.

Musk said during the interview that he’s ‘fairly confident’ that humans will land on Mars in about six years. Musk’s main focus is to ensure that “a lot of people to go to Mars and make life interplanetary.”

Musk even said that in probably two or three years, his own first trip to orbit might happen. He also repeated his dream of wanting to be buried in Mars eventually.