Elon Musk’s midlife crisis over populating Mars

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Elon Musk sounds like a man grappling with the reality that there are only so many trips left for him around the sun. At age 53, Musk is not yet an old man.

But the clock is ticking on his stated goal of reaching Mars and building a city there in his lifetime or, at least, his working lifetime. Such pressure is evident in his recent rash of tweets emphasizing the narrow window for interplanetary travel and complaints about pesky Earth rules that, he says, are slowing him down. It adds up to a classic midlife crisis—one of cosmic scale for this world’s richest man.

“Becoming multiplanetary is critical to ensuring the long-term survival of humanity and all life as we know it," Musk posted on X this past week, one of his common refrains about why he is so intent on reaching Mars. For the billionaire, who despite having spent the past two decades building SpaceX into a behemoth rocket maker, the problem boils down to one of timing. Only about once every 26 months do Earth and Mars come into a certain alignment that makes such a trip workable.

That time frame effectively gives his giant rocket, dubbed Starship, nine windows to reach the red planet throughout a roughly two-decade period. The next window opens in the fourth quarter, and Musk isn’t ready. “The first Starships to Mars will launch in 2 years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens," Musk announced this month.

“These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years." The reaction to his latest timeline was met with skepticism. Christopher Combs, a professor in aerodynamics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said