SpaceX has long set its sights on Mars and has made the bold promise that they will land humans on Mars in 2029, which will eventually pave the path for Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk’s plans for Mars colonization by 2050. Their confidence in their plans to set foot on Mars has only seemed to grow with their recent support for Trump’s promise to put the U.S. flag on Mars.

SpaceX has outlined a timeline for this goal: the first step being to send unmanned starships to Mars by 2026. Should this attempt be successful, SpaceX claims that they can send the first crewed mission to Mars in 2029 using the Starship spacecraft that is capable of holding both crew and equipment and a super-heavy rocket. Together, they claim, these two technologies will create a sustainable and reusable mode of transport to and from Mars. According to SpaceX, a trip from Earth to Mars using the technology in their Starship crafts would take around six months. The ship is designed to use local resources on Mars to refuel, then to return directly to Earth.

These claims certainly ignite the imagination of avid science fiction fans, but are these ambitious plans feasible? According to UCSB’s professor Bassam Bamieh — who specializes in the control and dynamics systems that relate directly to the technology used in space flight — the engineering community regard Musk’s claims with skepticism. 

It is true that SpaceX has accomplished extraordinary things: “One of their biggest innovations is the re-landing of booster rockets,” Bamieh explained. “That’s what has made them able to send so many satellites into orbit at lower cost.” Indeed, SpaceX’s operation Starlink successfully launched thousands of satellites around the world, providing internet to areas that have poor or no connection, and is an example of the impact SpaceX’s forward-thinking engineering can have on the world. 

SpaceX has cutting-edge structural technology for the Mars missions, namely, the Starship spacecraft, which they claim to be the most powerful launch vehicle developed in terms of its fuel capacity. However, despite this impressive capability, the company does not seem to possess any fundamentally novel propulsion technology that would enable significantly faster or cost-effective space travel. Bamieh affirms this: “They don’t have any innovative propulsion technology that they have publicly stated; their boosters will still use chemical propellants — there’s no way around that.” 

A lack of novel propulsion technologies plants doubts as to whether SpaceX will meet their deadline. However, in the past, it was SpaceX’s persistence that is a key ingredient to their success more so than new technologies, according to Bamieh. Unlike federally-funded companies like NASA, SpaceX has the money and resources for more trial and error, which, while less rigorous, has proven to get results faster. SpaceX’s success with re-landing rockets, for example, came from a lot of failed experimentation. According to Bamieh, “They blew up a lot of rockets to start doing this.” Such a methodology is unique to SpaceX, and Bamieh speculates it could be since “a lot of people came from the software industry, as opposed to the traditional aerospace industry where safety is a very crucial requirement … there’s a lot of trial and error.” 

In addition to resources and persistence, the reason SpaceX is able to confidently back the plan to put the U.S. flag on Mars lies in the uniqueness of their ambition among companies in the space industry to put humans on the planet. Other companies have refrained from such a goal due to the overwhelming resource demands of sending humans to planets, as opposed to simply sending robotic equipment to take data.

It’s one thing sending rockets to Mars, but sending humans to Mars and back is an astronomical task with far more demands, according to Bamieh, namely “sustaining human astronauts on these ships, and the size of these ships need to be significantly bigger than the robotic missions already sent to Mars. Life support needs to last much longer … and you need a spaceship capable of coming back, which has not been done in any robotic missions before.” Bamieh reasons that adding humans into the equation is not all that practical, as the “extra advantage is very questionable, but the costs are astronomically higher. Scientifically, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.” 

With this in mind, SpaceX’s fixation on getting humans to Mars seems less about scientific exploration or following scientific queries and more about taking the first steps in building a self-sufficient colony on Mars. This goal satisfies Musk’s sci-fi fueled vision, described in his own words as humanity “being a spacefaring civilization … going out there and being amongst the stars.”

Furthermore, SpaceX’s ambitious timeline for sending humans to Mars may be more optimistic than realistic, given the many challenges and potential causes for delay ahead. For instance, SpaceX carried out a failed launch of a test starship rocket last month, which would make it the seventh test flight that has ended in system failure. Further challenges lie in technical malfunctions, maintaining long-duration life support and in-orbit refuelling, to name a few. That being said, SpaceX has demonstrated resilience and innovation, as seen with their success in reusable rockets. It remains plausible that a Starship-class craft will eventually reach Mars, even if on a more flexible schedule.  

For SpaceX, landing a Starship craft on Mars seems more to be a matter of “when” as opposed to “if,” and landing some astronauts afterward is a direct consequence of their success in this mission. However, colonizing Mars is a far greater and ambitious challenge, requiring complex engineering systems that will ensure the survival of humans in what is currently a poisonous atmosphere. SpaceX’s ambitions regarding the landing of a craft on Mars, and subsequently the landing of humans on Mars, may have some hope. However, the question of whether humanity will successfully maintain a long-term presence on Mars by 2050 remains far from certain. 

A version of this article appeared on p.10 of the Feb. 13, 2025 edition of the Daily Nexus.