Elon Musk’s SpaceX Roadmap: Humans on the Moon in 3 Years, Mars in 5

Elon Musk has set out a new roadmap for SpaceX that would see astronauts back on the Moon within three years and the company’s first crewed mission to Mars within five, according to comments made during an interview with Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

Musk said SpaceX’s near-term focus is on returning to the Moon within the next two to three years, after which the company would look to open lunar travel beyond government-trained astronauts to ordinary people. He described a longer-term goal of a lunar base supporting thousands, or even tens of thousands, of residents and visitors within a decade — a scale he conceded is a dramatic jump from today’s reality, given that only a handful of people have ever been to the Moon, all through NASA’s Apollo programme more than five decades ago.

The plan depends on Starship, SpaceX’s large reusable spacecraft designed for missions beyond Earth orbit and built to carry both cargo and crew. It remains under testing and has not yet flown a crewed mission.

On Mars, which Musk called far more difficult to reach than the Moon because of the distance and travel time involved, he predicted the first human landing within five years, followed by the transport of thousands of people over the following decade — in line with his repeated argument that a Mars settlement could help make humanity multi-planetary.

Musk’s space timelines have a track record of running long: he predicted a Mars landing within a decade more than ten years ago, and in 2017 SpaceX said private passengers would fly around the Moon by 2018, a mission that never took place. He also used the interview to outline a newer ambition — launching SpaceX’s first artificial intelligence satellites as part of an expansion into space-based computing infrastructure.