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No, Elon, Starship Won’t be Going to Mars in 2026.
Mr. Overpromise is at it again.
I despise the Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” mentality. It reeks of children who were never expected to tidy up their own mess. Nothing emphasises that more than Starship. After nearly $10 billion and nine test launches, it hasn’t even orbited the Earth once or managed to deliver any of the minuscule dummy payloads it’s been using. Sure, you can learn a lot from failure, but SpaceX has openly stated that they have lost significant amounts of the flight data. On top of that, repeated failures from functionally the same cause heavily imply that they are, in fact, not learning from their failures. Yet, Musk announced just before the failed ninth test flight that they would be sending a Starship to Mars next year and landing a small army of Tesla Bots on the surface of Mars in 2027. Is this even remotely possible? Or has Musk’s brain finally given out under the weight of all those drugs?
Well, first, what is Musk’s harebrained plan?
So far, Starship has had two generations, and Musk plans to build several “Mars-ready” third-generation rockets in 2025 for this mission. These rockets will be 20 metres longer than the previous generation to accommodate more propellant, yet somehow, they are still expected to have a lighter dry mass than the previous…
