Mission to Mars: Elon Musk's 'Starship' enterprise

0:04Crowds gathered here at Starbase. One minute to go to launch. At Elon Musk's rocket launch facility on the coast of Texas, his SpaceX employees are holding their breath. We are through T-minus 40. We are counting down. On the launch pad stands Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. 30 seconds, the 10th liftoff of Starship. The tension is palpable. Technical problems and weather have already delayed this launch twice. And when they last tested the engines on Starship, it blew up on the launch pad. Launch is continuing, T-minus 30 seconds. A little further down the road, on a patch of scrubland, a small crowd of enthusiasts is also watching the launch pad with a growing sense of excitement.

1:00T-minus 10. Oh my God. Starship is finally ready to go. Five, four, three, two, one.

1:1633 engines ignite. Tongues of orange flame burst from the rocket's base and give way to a single purple flare, crackling and driving the 5 ,000-ton ship into the sky. Go, buddy! She's got liftoff! Woo! Oh my God! Woo! This is so gorgeous! Ah! Oh! Oh my God. Holy cow, look at the shockwaves in the sky. 0.3 kilometers altitude. Oh my God. Oh! Woo! A minute later, it's seven kilometers above the Earth. A minute more, 33 kilometers.

2:11The rocket will top out at 192 kilometers above Earth, traveling at 26 ,500 kilometers an hour, more than 21 times the speed of sound. As the rocket embarks on its return journey back towards Earth, the launch team is jubilant. It's been a successful day for the Starship project, which matters, because this is the rocket that Elon Musk, SpaceX, and even the U.S. government hope will take humans into space, back to the moon, and eventually, all the way to Mars. We need to be a multi-planet species. Being a multi-planet species is like taking out insurance for life itself.

3:05This is Tectonic from the Financial Times. I'm Peggy Hollinger. I report on the space industry for the FT. And in this series, I want to tell you the story of a new space race, well beyond the moon, a race to land and live on Mars. For decades, setting foot on Mars has been a staple of science fiction. But today, the US, China and Elon Musk have set their sights on making that dream a reality. I'll be asking if sending humans to Mars is worth the time, energy and money. Can we really get there? And why should we go? Given enough time, Earth is likely to experience some calamity. It could be something that humans do to themselves or an external event like happened to the dinosaurs.

3:57And this is the first time in 4.5 billion years that it's been possible to extend life beyond Earth. In this episode, the tech titan leading this new space race. Elon Musk and his mission to Mars.

4:16Today, a new moon is in the sky, a 23-inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian rocket. Do you think the Russians have whacked us? Definitely. I really do. I think it's a marvelous achievement. I think there'll soon be a man on the moon at this rate. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. For the first time, Earth has received pictures, good pictures, of Mars taken from ground level. By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth. And a landing on Mars will follow. And I expect to be around to see it. The idea of interplanetary travel is part of a long history of human exploration.

5:02We have always wanted to discover new places. to extend the boundaries of the known world. Space is an endless opportunity for new information and novel information that can continually challenge our understanding of the world. This is Casey Dreyer, Chief of Space Policy at the Planetary Society, a non-profit pro-space group that promotes the exploration of the cosmos. Here he is quoting astronomer Carl Sagan. We're at the shores of the cosmic ocean, and we're just dipping our toes in it. And there's no reason why we shouldn't go further. Humans, Casey says, are wired to explore. I think there is this fundamental human condition of just wanting to go somewhere perceived as an untouched land.

5:50If you're looking to explore an untouched land, Mars is an excellent candidate. At its closest, the planet comes within 35 million miles of Earth. That's about 150 times further away than the moon. But in space terms, it's pretty close. It's only six to eight months away. That means you can send spacecraft on a relatively rapid pace. If they fail, you can figure out why and send a new one relatively quickly. You're not waiting 10, 20 years to get to this destination before you learn anything about it. Not only is Mars physically close to Earth, it's a fairly similar planet. Our cosmic neighbor is made up of dry, rocky land with familiar features like mountains and canyons.

6:35It even has seasons and polar ice caps. And these parallels make it a valuable resource for scientists, particularly those who want to delve deeper into the history of the solar system and our own planet. Mars is a museum of the oldest rocks dating back to the origins of the solar system. It is a frozen-in-time cornucopia of original documents, so to speak, of the geologic record of how planets formed. By going to Mars, we're not just understanding Mars, we're unlocking the history of the entire formation of the solar system. In essence, Dreyer is saying that going to Mars might help us answer really fundamental questions like, why did life emerge on Earth, but seemingly nowhere else?

7:24As far as current understanding goes for life on Earth, life seemed to have formed basically as soon as it could. And if life on Earth began as soon as it could, why could it not have happened on Mars too? And what was special about Earth? And I think that the life question is one of the most profound questions that humans can grapple with. And we have an opportunity to directly test that hypothesis. NASA and other space agencies have been landing robotic spacecraft on Mars since the 1970s, complete with cameras and scientific instruments to study the Martian soil. Since the late 1990s, rovers have been crawling around the surface, analyzing rocks, sending back data, and looking for signs of Martian life.

8:11Science may be the main reason that governments and space agencies are interested in Mars, But that's not exactly what's driving the likes of Elon Musk. Musk wants to put humans on Mars, and not just for short stints. He wants them to live there, establish human colonies, and make mankind an interplanetary species. Ultimately, the most compelling reason to send humans to Mars is persist human existence, right? And in the long term, thousand year kind of timescales, it makes a lot of sense to want to have multiple sites of human flourishing in order to kind of preserve the potential for human existence.

8:55This is the Planet B theory. The idea that we should settle on another planet like Mars to safeguard the future of humanity in case something catastrophic happens on Earth. And Musk says this quest to colonize another planet needs to start happening now. We're going to try to go as fast as possible. You can think of this as really a race against time. That's Elon Musk speaking on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Can we make Mars self-sufficient before civilization has some sort of future fork in the road where there's either like a nuclear war or something or we get hit by a meteor? Or simply civilization might just die with a whimper in adult diapers instead of with a bang.

9:43Musk's ambition to spread humanity to distant planets seems inspired by the pages of science fiction. He's talked about Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, which has captured the imagination of space fans since it was written in the 1940s. Asimov tells the story of a brilliant mind who attempts to avert a dark future for humanity by preserving human knowledge on a distant planet, an idea that really seems to have resonated for Musk. If you know that there's likely to be another Dark Ages, which it seems, my guess is there probably will be at some point, then we want to make sure that there's enough of a seed of human civilization somewhere else to bring civilization back.

10:28I think that's why it's important to get a self-sustaining base, ideally on Mars because Mars is far enough away from Earth that a war on Earth, the Mars base, might survive. An apocalypse on Earth. A base on Mars. Spaceships shuttling the human race from planet to planet. It might still sound like the plot of a science fiction novel. But Musk isn't a science fiction writer. He's the founder of the world's leading rocket company. Musk founded SpaceX back in 2002, long before he became chief executive of Tesla or bought Twitter. And right from the beginning, its stated goal has been to make life multi-planetary.

11:11Last year, SpaceX launched more rockets than anyone else, carrying satellites and astronauts into orbit. The U.S. government relies on SpaceX to supply the International Space Station. And now, SpaceX is spending billions of dollars on the Starship program, building spaceships that could eventually take astronauts back to the Moon and ultimately to Mars.

11:52At the southern tip of Texas, on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, is a place called Starbase. Driving through the muddy, sandy flatlands from the nearby city of Brownsville, There isn't much to see along Highway 4 until you pass a bust of Elon Musk, about three meters tall, inscribed with the words Elon, a.k.a. Meme Lord. Further along the road are two small murals on freestanding slabs of concrete. One is a portrait of Musk under the words Occupy Mars. The other is a recreation of the Doge meme, a goofy image of a Shiba Inu dog that gave its name to the Dogecoin cryptocurrency championed by Musk.

12:39Another few miles, and a tiny crop of buildings comes into view. This is the testing facility and launch site for SpaceX. The gateway to Mars.

12:51So here we are. Here we are at the newly incorporated Starbase Texas, where we're going to develop the technology necessary to take humanity to another planet for the first time in the 4.5 billion year history of Earth.

13:15This is technically a city founded by Elon Musk for the sole purpose of launching rockets into space. On one building, there's a huge mural. It shows multi-story glass domes on Mars, full of lush vegetation, and outside, three rockets standing on the planet's surface. A few hundred feet away, there's a real-life version of one of those rockets. Starship, the vehicle built to take us to Mars. In an hour or so, this rocket will be transported to the launch pad down the road in preparation for liftoff. The flight test, Starship's 10th, is a big one. The last three attempts have not gone to plan. It's exploded.

14:00This thing has exploded. There's no one in that, right? No. No one was in it, right? No. Oh, thank God. On Flight 7, Starship exploded over the Caribbean. On Flight 8, Starship spun out of control and lost communication with Starbase. Oh, my God. I just saw that Starship blew up. There it is. On flight nine, Starship lost control following a fuel leak and broke up over the Indian Ocean. We had lost attitude control of the ship and entered into a spin, and it's going to make an uncontrolled reentry. And then, before flight 10... Video shows the Starship rocket bursting into a gigantic fireball.

14:43The private space company says that the vessel experienced a major anomaly. So for this launch, the pressure's on. People have traveled from all over the world to see it. Some have driven from Florida or Kentucky or California. Others have come from much further away, the UK, Canada, even Australia. Among them is our producer, Misha Frankel Duval. So I've just arrived along Highway 4 to Starbase. You can see the starship from kilometres and kilometres away. It is absolutely enormous. It's the day before launch, T-26 hours. That enormous ship is about to set off for the launch pad. I'm opposite the opening of the gates from the SpaceX facility where the starship will be rolled out from shortly.

15:50There are a small gaggle of fans, some streamers, some people taking selfies. There's a couple here on launch airs who've been camping out for some time, clearly. The rocket rolls slowly out onto the highway atop a huge square transport vehicle. The watching crowd jump into their cars and follow it at a crawling pace down the road. Among them is Ellie Sheriff. We have Ship 37, the ship that will presumably be launching tomorrow if the weather holds, rolling down Highway 4. So this is quite a treat, and you don't see this every day. Sheriff used to be a TV anchor, but she now runs a YouTube channel called Ellie in Space, where she covers space news.

16:37And so we are in traffic right now, backed up a little bit. waiting for the ship to cross the road. Why did the ship cross the road? Because it had to get to the launch pad. Sheriff drives to Boca Chica Beach, the public beach at the end of Highway 4, right next to the launch pad. It's really bizarre that you can get this close to this, you know, essentially an active construction site with big, giant vehicles. So it's unlike anything in the world. Now that Starship is in place, the next step is something called stacking, winching the 52-meter rocket onto a booster known as Super Heavy. And just to be able to see a full stack in person really gives you an appreciation for the size of Starship, which fully stacked is over 400 feet tall.

17:29And even if you're not a huge fan of space, I think you'll appreciate this. At the beach, the crowd are discussing which previous Starship flight test was their favorite. We're talking about the latest changes to the rocket's design. Some are space enthusiasts like Sheriff, but many are simply bona fide superfans of Elon Musk. I'm wearing a Tesla ball cap because we are Tesla owners and enthusiasts, my husband and I. So I'm representing Tesla, and then I'm also representing my Starship. I've got a Starship SpaceX shirt on as well. It's not just clothes. Several Tesla Cybertrucks are sitting on sand dunes nearby, some flying SpaceX flags.

18:13If you don't know someone's name, you're sure to know their handle on X, the social media site bought by Musk in 2022. Musk is a divisive figure in the U.S. and beyond. But among his fans at Starbase, he's a hero and a visionary. And as far as Musk's ambition to populate Mars goes, they're all in. You know, we do need to be interplanetary. I mean, not to be cliche and repeat what Musk has said, but I really believe that humanity needs to branch out. That's Brian Lone. He's a big fan of Musk's mission, and he's got the T-shirt to prove it. Yeah, so I'm wearing a shirt with the planet Mars on it with the words, I'd go at the top, because I would totally go.

19:00I would want to be the first ones to go there because that would lead the way. It's a one-way trip more than likely. That's fine with me because people can learn lessons from that, just like they're learning lessons from testing this and doing this rapidly. Like a lot of SpaceX fans, Lone's interest in space started in childhood. First, he got a telescope. Then he dreamed of watching a shuttle launch. Now, as an adult, he's dreaming of going to Mars. And so if I could sacrifice my time, even potentially my life, that's worth it to humanity for me. My wife, we've talked about it. I have three boys.

19:39I've told them I would totally go, and they understand that. And my friends are like, you're crazy. Co-workers think I'm absolutely insane. They want to stay here on planet Earth. Minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Go, buddy! Woo! Oh, my God! Woo! Part of Musk's appeal is in his personal branding. His followers love Musk the meme lord, and a cult of Musk has developed where his fans believe he is capable of doing anything he sets his mind to, even putting people on Mars. And seasoned advocates for Mars exploration say Musk's track record in the space industry means his ambitions for Mars should be taken seriously.

20:42Musk has accomplished a revolution in spaceflight by introducing reusable launch vehicles and showing the power of entrepreneurial space. That's Robert Zubrin. If you talk to people about Mars, his name comes up a lot. I was 17 when we landed on the moon, and if anybody had told me then that I'd be 73 and there wouldn't be people living on Mars, I would have said they were nuts. Like so many of his generation, Zubrin's love of space started in 1957, Then, five years old, he watched the Soviets launch the Sputnik satellite and wondered what humanity's future in space might look like. I did drawings of the moon, and I read all I could about space and rockets.

21:25And it rapidly became clear to me that Mars was the place that we really needed to go. As an adult, Zubrin went to grad school and became an astronautical engineer. In 1991, he co-wrote a research paper tackling some of the logistical challenges of going to Mars, like how to create oxygen on the planet. Humans, Zubrin said, could even make rocket fuel on Mars, making it possible to return to Earth. These ideas seem to have rubbed off on Elon Musk. Zubrin says the two men met at a 2001 fundraiser for the Mars Society, the non-profit he founded to advocate for human settlement on Mars. Musk donated to the organization and later joined its board.

22:13Zubrin and Musk do have their disagreements, but Zubrin acknowledges Musk and SpaceX are well-placed to win the race to Mars. He has shown that it is possible for a well-led team of engineers to accomplish things in the area of spaceflight, previously thought that only the governments and superpowers could do, and not only that, do it in one-third the time at one-tenth the cost, and even do things that they had deemed impossible altogether, like reusable launch vehicles that could come back and land on the launch pad instead of being crashed into the ocean. And this has already resulted in a reduction of cost of space launch over the past 10 years or so by a factor of five, which is remarkable because space launch costs had been static from about 1970 through 2010, hadn't come down at all, and in the past decade or so they've come down 80%.

23:08As Zubrin is sketching out, one of the biggest obstacles to human settlement on Mars is the sheer cost of getting people and the supplies they'll need into space. But with the revolution of Musk's reusable rockets enabling certain parts to be used again and again, SpaceX is chipping away at that problem. In 1981, taking a kilo of cargo to the International Space Station on a space shuttle cost about$45 ,000. In 2018, one of the SpaceX fleet, a rocket called Falcon Heavy, was able to do the same for 30 times less. Falcon Heavy will, in time, be replaced by Starship. As well as being much larger, Starship is different in one very important way.

23:58Eventually, it will carry humans. And if Starship is successful, we're going to have reusable heavy lift launch vehicles. And that's going to make a human settlement of space a very real prospect. So my hope is that SpaceX will succeed. My hope is that Musk refocuses on SpaceX instead of questionable political ventures that he has wasted a lot of time and energy and credibility on. And if he does, then I think Starship could reach orbit fully successfully this year. And if not this year, then certainly next year. And within a few years, we will have reliable, cheap transportation to orbit, including with heavy payloads, payloads of the size necessary for human expeditions to Mars.

24:44We approached SpaceX for an interview. We wanted to ask them a few things, including their timeline for flights to Mars. They didn't get back to us. But in a post shared on X this August, Musk said the first unmanned flight to Mars could happen within three and a half years. The first crewed flights, he said, could happen in just five and a half years. That would mean humans on Mars around 2031. But for all of Starship's promise, there is still a lot SpaceX has to prove before travel to Mars becomes a reality. You know, Musk is famous for having his timelines be off a bit. SpaceX has done absolutely amazing things.

25:29I have to admit that, but I don't believe the timeline. I think it'll take more than five to ten years. Kelly Wienersmith is a biologist and co-author of the 2023 book A City on Mars. For her, it's not just safely launching Starship with humans inside. You have to keep those humans happy and healthy. You have to make sure they have enough fuel to get to where they're going. Then you actually have to land them on Mars. I'm also not clear on whether or not we figured out the technology for landing people on the surface of Mars. So it's tough because, you know, here on Earth, if you want to land people on Earth, our thick atmosphere helps slow you down on the trip back to Earth.

26:10But Mars has a very thin atmosphere, so you'd need a whole different way to land people on the red planet. And it's not clear to me that we've started working on building that yet. And that could take a really long time to figure out. So I think it's not just about getting the rockets off the ground. There's a lot of additional work that needs to go into it. Maybe Musk has been working on that stuff in secret, and I don't know about it. But I think that could take probably easily another 5, 10 years. And another challenge. The planets need to align, literally. If you want to fly from Earth to Mars, you probably want to do it when the orbits of those planets make the journey to Mars shortest.

26:48That happens about once every two years. The next window is at the end of 2026. So if Musk wants to get to the red planet by 2031, he doesn't have many opportunities to do it.

27:07Humans won't be on Mars next year. They almost certainly won't be there in five years. But we are slowly getting to a place where it's not impossible to imagine the first human footsteps on the red planet. And many people think Elon Musk's SpaceX is the most likely to make that happen. But SpaceX isn't the only organization with ambitions to go to Mars. After all, for decades, space exploration has been the preserve of national governments and their space agencies. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Through NASA, the U.S.

27:50government has its own ambitions to get to Mars. But the agency is beset by problems. Everybody's running in the direction they think they're supposed to be going. There's no formal plan other than go to Mars. What does that mean? Then there's the very public falling out between Musk and Trump. I'm very disappointed in Elon. I've helped Elon a lot. And meanwhile, America's greatest geopolitical rival is making headway on its own plans for Mars. The Chinese have unique ways of enforcing their schedules, but they're also realistic about their schedules. They've got support for their global space ambitions, which includes becoming the world's dominant space power.

28:32by 2045, although I think they're on track to do it much sooner. So who will win the race to the red planet? And if anyone does make it to Mars, who gets to write the rules? That's coming up in the next episode of Tectonic, part two, the new space race.

29:02You've been listening to Tectonic, presented by me, Peggy Hollinger. This episode was produced by Misha Frankel Duval. The senior producer is Edwin Lane. The executive producer is Flo Phillips. Fact-checking by Simon Greaves. Sound design by Breen Turner and Samantha Jovinko. Manuela Saragossa is the FT's acting co-head of audio.

29:32Thank you.