Will Elon Musk’s plans for Mars finally return to Earth?

You may have heard, but apparently Elon Musk is a moon fan now. He has historically been the ultimate cheerleader for human missions to Mars, and as recently as last year, He said His goal was to head directly to the red planet and that the moon was a “distraction.” Now he seems to have changed his mind, Announcement SpaceX has shifted its focus to building a city on the moon.

Within the space science community, this news about the Moon has been largely met with astonishment, mainly because many have become jaded by Musk’s overly ambitious plans and wildly unrealistic timescales.

“It was difficult for me to take Mars plans seriously,” said Wendy Whitman Cobb, a space policy expert from the School of Advanced Aeronautics and Space Studies. I’ve monitored job postings at SpaceX in recent years and noted that the company has shown no interest in hiring for roles related to Mars technologies. This suggests a long-standing disconnect between the actual work SpaceX is doing in Starship development versus the grandiose way Musk has talked about future colonization plans.

“I’m not sure SpaceX was focused on Mars at all. I think that was largely Musk,” she said.

Even among ardent Mars enthusiasts, there is recognition that the technical challenges standing between humanity and a manned Mars mission are great. Building habitats, growing food, protecting against radiation, and other issues of infrastructure and procedures are big hurdles to overcome, not to mention challenges like refueling rockets in space and launching a rocket from another planet – which comes with its own challenges related to an extremely thin carbon dioxide atmosphere and the lack of a launch pad to use as a stable base.

All of these issues are potentially solvable, but they require the development and testing of new technologies, which will take years or, more likely, decades. And when you’re looking for a proving ground, the Moon — a few days away from Earth, with the possibility of emergency evacuation — is much more attractive than Mars, where astronauts will be on their own for months at a time.

This has been the approach taken by NASA in recent years under its Moon to Mars program. First, according to the logic, we use the Artemis program to test and practice placing astronauts on a lunar base for weeks or more, and then use that knowledge to send future explorers on long-term missions to Mars.

“The Moon is the most natural place in the world for me to start in terms of a long-term continuous presence in deep space,” said astronomer Paul Byrne of Washington University in St. Louis. It would have been easier to do this construction directly from the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, when institutional knowledge was still available, but it could still be done: “The best time to do it was after Apollo, but the second best time to do it is now.”

There are also good scientific reasons to visit the Moon, such as learning about the composition of the solar system. There are even proposals to place telescopes there, taking advantage of the lack of atmosphere to allow a much larger capacity for a smaller telescope compared to those on Earth.

But the most pressing motivations for returning humans to the Moon are largely geopolitical, with China seeking to expand its human space program and presence there within the next decade, while the United States does not want to be defeated.

Likewise, SpaceX’s driving motivation may be less philosophical and more classically capitalist, as the company engages in some legacy competition with rival Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos’ company is developing its own lunar lander for NASA, potentially overtaking SpaceX to become an important partner for NASA on the moon.

“Maybe it’s just basic business rivalry,” Whitman Cobb said. “This has been the hallmark of Blue Origin versus SpaceX for decades.” There’s also the matter of SpaceX An IPO is on the horizon And the need to show investors what a realistic plan to make money might entail.

Whatever the motivations of those involved, and for all the frustration generated by Musk’s ill-considered approach to the space policy announcement, there is hope that his support for a feasibly achievable moon mission will be a positive step.

“I find it encouraging, because it’s more realistic,” said Keller Cohn, acting director of science at Lowell Observatory. “Even if the timeline may still be unrealistic.”

And so far, so is Musk He claims soAfter the moon missions, SpaceX will build a city on Mars “in about 5 to 7 years,” which is a very optimistic timeline given that Starship has not yet proven its airworthiness. You may remember Musk previously claiming that humans will be on Mars by then 2022or 2024or 2029.

He has too discussion Making cities on Mars “self-sufficient” is a more ambitious and unrealistic goal for the near future, as well as science fiction ideas such as terraforming Mars and building spaceports there. This does not mean that these grand plans can never be achieved by humanity, but they certainly will not happen in any of our lifetimes, and to pretend that they will enable human life on Mars within the next few years is an illusion at best and completely deceptive at worst.

After all, it is easy to make an announcement, but much more difficult to deal with the delicate, gradual process of technological development – ​​especially when there are human lives at stake. Under these circumstances, experts are not surprised when space project timelines continually slip.

“When you go from marketing to actual engineering, that’s always what’s going to happen,” Cohen said.

He points out that there is value in being frank about the scale of the challenges ahead: “If people understand that these problems are difficult and that they will take decades – they may not want to hear it, but they will get a better idea of ​​how this really works, and in some ways, that can be inspiring. It’s a multi-generational problem: I won’t be able to go to Mars, but maybe my daughter will.”

However, as the gap between technology marketing rhetoric and the slow, expensive and cautious reality of space exploration widens, “there’s a danger that the public will get fed up with this, at a time when NASA and other space agencies need the public to get behind them,” Byrne said.

As the face of space exploration for much of the public, Musk’s words still carry weight and therefore responsibility: “There will come a point where the public will either lose interest or start to believe that this is a scam and it will never work.”