Why SpaceX Delayed Its Mars Missions to the 2030s

The Mars launch window opened in late October. This month. Right now, basically. And by Elon Musk's own plan from last year, five uncrewed Starships should be flying through it.

And how many actually are?

Zero.

None? Not one?

Not one. And the next time Earth and Mars line up like this for a cheap, low-energy trip... late twenty twenty-eight into early twenty twenty-nine. You wait twenty-six months or you don't go.

So what happened? Because that plan was really specific. I remember the Optimus robots.

Very specific. Musk laid it out at Starbase in May of last year. Five uncrewed Starships in twenty twenty-six, landing twenty twenty-seven, carrying Tesla's bipedal Optimus robots. Then twenty ships in twenty-eight, at least one with people aboard.

People. In twenty twenty-eight.

Then a hundred ships in thirty-one. Five hundred in thirty-three. Working up to, his words, a thousand or two thousand ships per Mars rendezvous.

Okay, that's not a schedule, that's a mood.

And then on February ninth this year, SpaceX announced it was pushing Mars back by roughly five to seven years to focus on the Moon.

Five to SEVEN years. That's not a slip, that's the whole thing moving to a different decade.

Early to mid twenty thirties, realistically, for the first Starship on Mars. And two things drove it. One is a contract. The other is a plumbing problem.

Plumbing? On a rocket?

Cryogenic propellant transfer. To go to Mars, a Starship needs roughly nine hundred and thirty tons of liquid oxygen and two hundred and sixty-seven tons of liquid methane. It can't carry that off the pad. So tanker Starships fill a depot in orbit, and the Mars ship fuels up there.

A gas station in space. We've all heard the pitch. What's actually hard about it?

The fuel is extremely cold, and in microgravity it doesn't sit at the bottom of a tank. It floats. You're trying to pour something that has no idea which way down is, between two vehicles, repeatedly.

Has anyone done it?

SpaceX has moved propellant between tanks inside one ship. Between two ships? Never. Nobody has. It was aspirationally on Flight Fifteen or Sixteen, no earlier than mid and late October... and those apparently slipped to mid-to-late November, with no firm public date.

So the single thing Mars depends on hasn't been demonstrated once.

And here's the part I find genuinely strange. Starship turned ten years old this month. Ten years. And it has never reached orbit.

Wait. Hold on. We've watched these launches. The ones that go up and come down over the Indian Ocean.

Suborbital. All ten integrated flight tests. Orbital altitude, yes, but a controlled splashdown trajectory, not orbit. And last year was rough — three Starships exploded in flight, one exploded on the ground during a static fire in June.

So the Mars delay isn't really about Mars. They're nowhere near ready.

Partly. But the other half is NASA. On October twenty-third, Administrator Jared Isaacman stood at Kennedy Space Center and said Artemis Four — the first American boots on the Moon since Apollo — is still on for twenty twenty-eight.

Which uses Starship.

As a lander. And NASA rewrote how it works, because SpaceX still has to prove that fuel transfer. Now the Starship lander waits in Earth orbit, docks with Orion there, and pushes Orion all the way to low lunar orbit itself.

NASA is modifying Orion so a SpaceX ship can shove it to the Moon?

Yes. Isaacman said their machine shops are running twenty-four seven and they're building, quote, a Super Bowl-caliber team.

That's a man who knows his deadline is two years out.

And every tanker flight, every engineer, every hour of life support development goes to the Moon first. Mars gets what's left.

So while SpaceX is doing lunar homework... who's actually moving toward Mars right now?

China. Tianwen-3. Launching around twenty twenty-eight on two Long March Five rockets, aiming to bring back at least five hundred grams of Martian rock by about twenty thirty-one.

Five hundred grams. That's a bag of sugar.

It's a bag of sugar nobody on Earth has ever held. And they're not being clever about it, land in one spot, grab, go. Space dot com reported that if the timeline is accurate, it represents a Sputnik moment.

Those are strong words.

They're picking the landing site by the end of this year. Flight hardware's already in development.

So the scoreboard right now is... SpaceX has the biggest plan and China has the nearest date.

And a window closing in a few weeks with nothing in it. SpaceX still sells Mars cargo on its website, by the way. A hundred million dollars a ton, no earlier than twenty twenty-eight.

You can still email sales?

There's an address and everything. I keep meaning to write.