Life on Mars? The reality of Musk’s billion dollar mission

Could we really move to Mars? Perhaps not. Writer Christian Uva looks into the plausibility of Musk’s interplanetary agenda.

Ever since humans figured out how to leave Earth, we have tried to do so. Following the Apollo 11 Moon landings in 1969, Mars became the natural next step. Space agencies and science fiction writers alike have conjured plans for living on the Red Planet, but it’s always felt like a far-future fantasy. Today, however, it seems more likely than ever to happen in our lifetimes. 

Tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have set their sights on starting colonies on Mars in the coming decades. It’s a lofty goal, but with decades of technological advancements and research on long-term spaceflight, it’s a real possibility. But is it really as possible as it’s being made to seem? And more importantly, would anyone really want to live the rest of their life there?

The first hurdle for any potential Mars mission is the cost. Flying to space is incredibly expensive. NASA’s most recent Martian rover Perseverance, which is shorter than a MINI Cooper, cost over £2.2 billion to develop and launch. Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’ Blue Origin have designed reusable, super-heavy launch vehicles to dramatically lower the price of launches. SpaceX’s plan is to refuel its Starship on the Martian surface by mining methane and water ice to convert into fuel for the return flight, which would reduce costs and improve efficiency. It estimates that a Starship launch could eventually cost as little as £1.618 million, which would make a potential mission more feasible—that is, if the rocket works as advertised.

Once the mission gets off the ground, it will take a while to get to Mars. If a mission departs for Mars during a brief period of time called a launch window, it would take between six and seven months to get to the planet. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station regularly spend six months to a year in low gravity, but the human body can only float around for so long. Over time, the lack of gravity causes their bones and muscles to weaken and their eyesight to worsen. A transfer spacecraft would need artificial gravity to maintain proper health and bodily functioning. The journey might also take its toll on a person’s mental health. Unlike in low Earth orbit, where communication delays last less than a second, it could take up to eight minutes to relay messages between a spacecraft and Earth, making those in transit more isolated than any humans have ever been.

Surviving the journey is only the beginning. Once they climb down the ladder, plant a flag, and make a grandiose, cliché-laden speech about human exploration, it will dawn on them that they’re in a frozen, toxic wasteland with very few resources and little gravity. They’ll also likely remember that if something goes wrong, as it tends to do in space travel, the next transfer window to Earth is a 26 month waiting period away.

Thankfully, if the space agency—or private spaceflight company—operating the mission has thought ahead, there will be a habitat on the surface ready and waiting. They would need this because the atmosphere on Mars is composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide, which, in high concentrations, can be lethal. This atmosphere is also a fraction of the thickness of Earth’s, and with no ozone layer, radiation can pass right through. The temperature outside is also a nippy negative 60 degrees Celsius–that’s the same as Antarctica. You would need a spacesuit and life support system just to take a walk. Musk’s solution to this problem is to terraform the planet by dropping nuclear bombs at the poles to warm its atmosphere. In reality, this would do nothing because there’s not enough carbon dioxide in the air for the greenhouse effect needed to warm the atmosphere. Sorry, Elon.

It’s also unclear how long this colony might be sustained. The first people to settle on Mars are likely never coming back to Earth, so they’ll live the rest of their lives there. Because of Mars’ lower gravity, which is 38% that of Earth’s, astronauts would experience some of the side effects mentioned earlier, which could spell disaster. While more astronauts can be sent from Earth, to create a self-sustaining settlement, the people there would need to reproduce. We don’t know what effects a low-gravity environment will have on pregnancy and prenatal development, and it would be hard to convince someone to be the first to find out. 

So, the plan is to spend billions of pounds to send people on a one-way trip to a planet hundreds of millions of kilometers away from home with deadly conditions. Apart from being able to say we’ve put boots on Mars, what’s the ultimate purpose of it? Platitudes about science and exploration are often thrown around, but we’ve learned a lot about the planet from robotic rovers and probes without wasting human lives. Musk says that we need to become an “interplanetary species” to survive far into the future. He claims that Earth will not sustain life forever, so we need to venture into space to prevent extinction. Who will be on that metaphorical lifeboat is an important question to raise. Some view Musk’s push to move to Mars as an escape from the ongoing climate crisis for him and other one-percenters. While he claims that anyone will eventually be able to move to Mars—if they have around £400,000 to spend—young people feel that this plan will only help the wealthy who can actually afford that price tag. As the climate crisis worsens, many people agree that billionaires should focus on slowing the Earth’s rising temperatures before they spend their wealth on abandoning the planet. 

Whether or not it’s a good idea to send people to Mars, Musk is going to try to do it anyway. He wants to land humans on the planet by 2028, and to create a city by 2044. Musk has made many grand proclamations like this before and the year of the first landing continues to get pushed back, but now he has the support of the recently inaugurated U.S. President and a role in his administration as the czar of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Musk may try to leverage his position to make his mission a reality.

If a Starship does land humans on Mars in 2028, as Musk claims, it will be an unparalleled technological accomplishment for humankind. What happens after the landing, though, is completely unknown. If things do go wrong, the next launch window won’t be for another two years. With humans stranded on an uninhabitable planet, Musk’s mission to Mars could end up making history for all the wrong reasons.