SpaceX could land on Mars in three-four Years: Elon Musk
Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, said the company could land a spacecraft on Mars three to four years from now.
The suggestion was made as Musk appeared via videoconference Thursday at the International Astronautical Congress in Azerbaijan, along with other tidbits on the progress of Starship, a gargantuan rocket that SpaceX is developing.
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«I think it's sort of feasible within the next four years to do an uncrewed test landing there,» Musk told Clay Mowry, the president of the International Astronautical Federation, during a one-hour question-and-answer session.
A year that sums it up: 2022
Musk and SpaceX have a strong track record of achieving remarkable breakthroughs in spaceflight. That includes the routine landing and reuse of the booster stages of SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rockets: The company has launched 70 times this year alone.
But Musk has another track record: taking far longer than predicted to achieve his goals.
Musk first unveiled his Mars rocket, then an even larger rocket called the Interplanetary Transport System, at an International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2016. He predicted that SpaceX's first uncrewed landing on the red planet would occur in 2022, followed by the first flight with people aboard in 2024.
So far, there has been one test flight of Starship, in April, which made it off
