SPACEX: NEXT STOP MARS
A steel spacecraft 50 metres high lands on the surface of Mars. Red dust rises into the air as flames from the craft’s engines slow it to land safely. A few hundred metres away is the small Mars colony that astronauts have spent years building in the barren landscape: fuel factories, laboratories, greenhouses and living-quarter modules. The hundred passengers that step out of the spacecraft are new colonists who are to co-exist and cooperate on the Red Planet, before some eventually return on the same spacecraft.
This is no science-fiction story. The craft is known as Starship, and plans are afoot for it to begin carrying astronauts to Mars as early as 2024, to begin building that Mars base in accordance with the ambitions of Elon Musk, founder of American aerospace company SpaceX, which introduced a prototype of Starship in September 2019.
Beginning a Mars base within four years may sound ambitious, but then Elon Musk is known for his confident declarations. With the successful May 30 ‘Launch America’ of two astronauts to the ISS Space Station, the famous founder of Tesla has momentum on his side. But Musk has also earned criticism for pushing time schedules and promoting high-risk technological projects. Only one day before Launch America, the Starship SN4 prototype exploded during testing. So will this be the craft which finally sends people to Mars, proving Musk a visionary, or is the project unrealistic, even
