Elon Musk says SpaceX Starship will departs for Mars at the end of next year, carrying Optimus. If those landings go well, then human landings may start as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely.
There will likely be hundreds to thousands of Optimus Teslabots on the unmanned missions. There will be a larger unmanned and possibly manned mission in the 2028-2029 launch window.
Starship departs for Mars at the end of next year, carrying Optimus.
If those landings go well, then human landings may start as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely. https://t.co/JRBB95sgNN
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 15, 2025
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Who pays for this? The US tax payer or from Elon Musk and a few other billionaires’ pocket? Is there a bigger economic picture here, or is it just a billionaire’s vanity project?
Have a main mothership with hundreds of pods each containing a one or two bots
I would have three main ships for redundancy with each having a grok cluster on board along with a modular reactor for power
Motherships can stay in orbit orchestrating the bots on the ground. Make sure to plan for failure and bot losses on landings. Repair bots should be a primary concern in order to provide a solid foundation for builds
Maybe go for part drops as opposed to completed bots. Repair/build bots could handle the scale up. Power can start with solar and then drops can happen for modular reactors
Deploy Starlink for comms to ground stations/bots orchestration and away we go!
Just do it Musk, you turnip!
Musk hasn’t said anything about it, but it would make sense to also send the most advanced hardware cluster running Grok on one of the Starships, several tons at least of neural network inference compute. This would be something like the HAL9000 in Space Odyssey, running the Mission locally. It would be intermediate between human controllers that are from a few to over 20 light minutes away each way, and the Optimus bots doing the work. Presumably there would also be a Mars version of Starlink in orbit and a powerful laser com link to Earth. The high bandwidth connection would let the mission send back far more data than ever before and for SpaceX to send things like big update files for Grok based on improved versions trained on Earth. This would probably be Grok6 running on NN hardware 2 generations ahead of what’s being delivered now.
Yeah, they will need portable versions of their AI.
Settlers will use that a lot, and delegate over it plenty of stuff, so it needs to be powerful and responsive, hence local.
The bots themselves will be tools for the AI to use, and perform more complex operations.
Sounds like a sci/fi movie, but we are on the verge of having that autonomy and delegation here on Earth. But on Mars it will be indispensable.
If they can make robots that can do most of the work as a human, it makes sense to start out creating a fully-automated space colony. Once the industrial supply chain is recreated on Mars, then you can start sending people there. It does not make sense to send people in the initial stages of colonization at all.
This will all take longer than Elon Musk’s projected working career, especially now that he’s veered into the time-consuming and endlessly draining world of politics and social media.
This is what typically happens to highly intelligent tech, or other, entrepreneurs as they enter their 50s (Musk is 53). Their initial interests that made them wealthy beyond any possible needs, give way to more long-term and larger, even global, concerns. This has happened to Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos too, and was beginning to happen to Steve Jobs, before he tragically died at 56.
No tech entrepreneur has continued with his main business much past 60, which is the age Musk will be under any realistic scenario of using Starship – which has only succeeded in producing spectacular explosions to date and a half orbit of its upper half transporting a banana to the Indian Ocean. Refueling in space – 10-20+ times – remains a distant and almost certainly dangerous prospect, far too risky for manned crews to participate in for the rest of the decade, if not longer.
There’s also the possibility that some systemic structural deficit is inherent in ultra-large spaceships that will negatively affect payload capacity to rectify, if it can be fixed at all – e.g. it may be that intense vibrations can’t realistically be controlled or mitigated.
Further, Musk announced, so far in only single tweet I was able to see on X, that he will be expanding the diameter in future versions of Starship, presumably to increase fuel capacity and maybe landing diameter ratio to height too. So far, only the height has increased. Increasing the diameter will involve substantial changes not just in Starship, but in aerodynamics, flight efficiency, and tower capabilities to retrieve booster and upper stages. There are also extreme environmental considerations from noise, pollution, and debris risk. It remains to be seen if Musk’s current political influence/control will continue to insulate SpaceX from FAA and other agency scrutiny. Note: Musk’s poll ratings show an increasing disapproval of him and his activities, as well as sharp dropoffs in acceptance of his Tesla cars and other businesses, where he gets most of his income, and clout.
This is an insightful response to Musk’s statements about Mars. It appears he tried to demonstrate continued progress, but Starship problems continue and near term resolution is not in sight.