The Mars Fantasy
Man on Mars
The Grand Plan
The Landing
A “Realistic Plan”?
Searching for Signs of Intelligent Life (on Earth)
Mars Conclusion
The Mars Fantasy
Before we can discuss SpaceX intelligently, we need to clear some smoke from the room, and that means facing the facts about “Elon Musk’s” adventure to Mars. Men have dreamed of going to Mars for countless generations. For at least the past 75 years, there have been literally hundreds of books and movies about Mars and Martians, about traveling to Mars, about colonising it. This dream of going to Mars has been proposed by hundreds of scientists and others over many decades, and is not particular to Elon Musk. But recently we have had hundreds of websites, and articles in the mass media, sometimes daily, giving credit to only one man, and we begin to think that the idea of men going to Mars is a radically new idea created by the “scientific genius and outstanding inventor” Elon Musk. We have more than 100 headlines like this:
Elon Musk’s Mars Ambition: Bypassing the Moon for the Red Planet
Elon Musk says life on Mars possible
Elon Musk’s Mars Mission Math: Building A Self-Sustaining City
Elon Musk on how human colony in Mars will be
Elon Musk Reveals What It Takes to Build a City on Mars
The Astronomical Gamble: Elon Musk’s Vision for Mars
Elon Musk’s plan to slash Mars colonisation cost
It should be clear that there is a legend-building promotion occurring here, but also something much larger than this, as you will see. Do not dismiss the thought that powerful forces are behind the media flood. Nothing like this happens without planning at a very high level, and with a distinct purpose.
Man on Mars
Elon Musk swears he founded SpaceX solely to fulfill his dream of colonising Mars, and has prepared a detailed plan:
(1) 2026: 5 unmanned Starships to deliver 10-ton payloads for infrastructure testing
(2) 2028–2029: 20+ Starships with 75-ton payloads to prepare landing zones
(3) 2030–2031: 100 crewed Starships (150 tons each) to establish habitats
(4) 2033: 500 Starships for a self-sustaining colony using in-situ resource utilization
But there are a few problems with Musk’s “four-phase Mars colonization plan”. The first is that, as of July, 2025, Musk has managed only one launch of a Starship that didn’t explode. The last two Starship flights ended in what SpaceX termed a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”. If you’re new to the world of euphemisms, that means a rocket that surprisingly (and quickly) “disassembled” itself by exploding. That is not the usual meaning of the word ‘disassemble’.
There is still no evidence Musk can put a Starship into orbit even around earth, much less send one to Mars. And even if one did reach Mars, there is no guarantee it could land without crashing. But we are being told that in 6 months Musk will send 5 unmanned Starships to Mars, loaded with freight, and that they will all land safely. And two years later, another 20 much heavier Starships “to prepare landing zones”, and a couple of years later another 100 Starships, these at 150 tons and carrying 100 passengers each. That’s 10,000 people on Mars – at $10 billion each – only 5 years from the date of writing (July, 2025). And another two years later, another 500 Starships to Mars. That is 625 Starships (and 60,000 people) in only 7 years, when we can’t even launch one without it exploding. Realistically, the chances of this appear to be vanishingly slim. The vast gap between current capability and even the 2026 targets seems physically impossible.
The Grand Plan
This portion is such nonsense I am embarrassed to include it, but Elon Musk heavily promoted it and it received quite a bit of international press coverage, so I suppose I might as well deal with it here.
“Elon Musk is convinced he will build a city of a million people on Mars by 2050, and is already planning the first manned flight to Mars in 2023. He plans to build a ‘Mars Colonial Fleet’ of more than one thousand cargo ships which would depart ‘en masse’ and could [each] transport 200 passengers at a time, along with materials to build homes, industrial plants and shops. Describing the journey, he added: “It has got to be really fun and exciting. It cannot feel cramped and boring. Therefore, the crew compartment or the occupant compartment is set up so that you can do zero-gravity games. You can float around. There will be movies, lecture halls, cabins and a restaurant. It will be really fun to go. You are going to have a great time.” [1]
Although the current cost of sending a person to Mars is around $10 billion, Musk calculates that by fueling cargo ships in space using tankers travelling from the Earth, the cost could be brought down to around $100,000 per person. He envisages building methane plants on Mars which could fuel rockets for the trip back to Earth, a journey which he estimates will take as little as 30 days in the future. (The trip currently takes about three years). There is little evidence that the necessary raw materials for a methane plant exist on Mars, and even less evidence that “Elon Musk” can reduce the cost per person to Mars from $10 billion to $100,000.
Reality Check: Mars Timeline vs. Technical Progress; Current Status (July 2025):
(1) Starship has achieved only 1 successful test launch (May 2025) after 12 prior attempts ended in explosions or partial failures.
(2) Sending Starships to Mars requires orbital refueling mastery, which is untested, and precision landing technology which doesn’t exist, both critical for Mars missions.
Meeting 2026 Mars Launch Window: Technically Impossible
Consider the logistical absurdities in Musk’s Mars plan. We would need 625 Starships by 2033, which would demand the production of one new complete Starship every 4 days; yet the current rate is 1 every 3 months. There is the launch infrastructure; current spaceports cannot handle anything like the proposed number of launches. Then there is the problem of the “Mars window” – the times when Mars’ orbit is sufficiently close to earth to make a voyage possible. These windows occur only once every 26 months. Then there is the cost: 625 Starships would cost more than $500 billion, while NASA’s total annual budget for 2025 was $35 billion. [2] And Musk’s claim that fueling cargo ships in space will bring the cost per person down from $10 billion to $100,000, is so ludicrous and vacuous no comment is possible.
This is the National Geographic article where Musk claims the Starships would be waiting in earth orbit for the Mars window: “We’d ultimately have upward of a thousand or more spaceships waiting in orbit. And so the Mars colonial fleet would depart en masse”. [3]
I wrote earlier that Mars windows occur only every 26 months. Musk’s “solution” is advertised as sending the 500 (or 1,000) manned Starships into high earth orbit and having them sit there – with all their human crew members for as long as two years, waiting for the Mars window to open. That would require enormous amounts of food and human necessities, plus not only the mastery of orbital refueling but the sending into orbit of sufficient fuel for the 500 (or 1,000) waiting Starships. Plus, food and life support for 100,000 people. The entire idea is absurd.
This orbital staging – parking 500 crewed ships for months or years, is physically and practically impossible. We have enormous orbital refueling challenges and critical life support limitations, to say nothing of psychological factors. For the orbital parking scenario, the numbers are staggering. Each Starship’s 100+ ton payload capacity would be largely consumed by life support alone. The 500-ship fleet would need over 1.8 million tons of supplies just for the waiting period – requiring 18,000 dedicated cargo launches. Elon Musk’s plan to park 500 crewed Starships in Earth orbit for up to 26 months awaiting Mars transfer windows is scientifically indefensible and operationally impossible. This makes the plan logistically implausible not only within Musk’s timeframe, but even within his lifetime and likely forever.
The linchpin of Musk’s plan is orbital refueling, but this has never even been attempted, much less proven. And the refueling scale is staggering: fueling 500 Starships in orbit would demand about 20,000 tanker launches because each Starship would need 40 refueling flights. Then there is the problem of cryogenic fuel boil-off: methane/oxygen storage in orbit loses 3-5% monthly due to solar heating. After 26 months, tanks would be near-empty – requiring additional tanker fleets just to top off evaporating fuel. The passengers on each of those ships would need 54,000 tons per year of food and water, requiring about 550 dedicated cargo resupply ships. Then, the people on those ships need to breathe, and that would require about 1,800 tons of oxygen per year. At the time of writing, there are no closed-loop systems that exist for this, and ordinary CO₂ scrubbing fails beyond 18 months. Then, there is no radiation shielding.
Worse, humans exposed to microgravity for more than 12 months suffer irreversible bone/muscle loss and vision impairment. NASA’s Mars simulations show 40% crew incapacity at only 18 months. Then there is the problem of structural fatigue that raises the probability of failure to a near-certain disaster. The Starship’s stainless-steel hull can’t withstand 26 months of orbital thermal cycling (day/night swings of ±150°C). Cracks would proliferate, risking explosive decompression. Then we have the problem of crew psychology, of locking 100,000 people in cramped ships for years, which should almost guarantee psychosis and suicides. Then we have the absurd economics: Parking 500 Starships would require $500 billion for fuel and supplies alone, which is about 15 times NASA’s annual budget.
The Landing
Regarding Mars landing capabilities, Musk is promoting a totally imaginary supersonic retrorocket approach, but NASA’s one-ton Curiosity rover required a complex “sky crane” landing system. Scaling this to 5,000-ton Starships with retrorockets alone seems an implausible fantasy. Landing a 5,000-ton Starship requires deceleration forces exceeding current tech by orders of magnitude. Plus, the Mars atmosphere is only 1% of Earth’s density, providing negligible aerodynamic braking and making a controlled descent extremely difficult. No existing model validates this. As of July 2025, Starship has made no successful orbital re-entry or landing on Earth, much less Mars.
From the National Geographic: “landing a heavy craft on a planet with a thin atmosphere will be difficult. It was tough enough to gently lower NASA’s Curiosity rover to the surface, and at 2,000 pounds, that payload weighed just a fraction of Musk’s proposed vessels. Musk plans to develop supersonic retrorockets that can gradually and gently lower a much heavier spacecraft to the Martian surface. [4]
Sending a Starship to Mars, loaded with supplies, in 2026 seems a bit unrealistic.
Elon Musk is developing “supersonic retrorockets to gently lower a 5,000-ton spaceship on Mars? On a planet that has no communications infrastructure to support landing? Mars is not an airport with a Starship Instrument Landing System (ILS), GPS, ground control, or communications. Landing would rely on autonomous systems that failed in 5/7 Starship tests. Plus, the Starship must survive the intensely-heated entry and propulsive landing, and then be refueled and sent back to Earth so it can start over again. But the fuel for the return trip could come only from a Starship that has successfully landed on Mars….
To date, no one has provided any evidence-based analysis that separates reality from Elon Musk’s Mars colonisation fantasies. The brutal truth is that parking humans in orbit for years is biologically suicidal, economically ruinous, and technically fraudulent. It would be a graveship fleet. There is a good reason that astrophysicists have called this plan “the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard”.
A “Realistic Plan”?
Let’s abandon the 500-Starship fleet and think small for a moment. What are the possibilities of Elon Musk sending even just one Starship to Mars in 2026? Well, we still have all the same problems. For one thing, we have no assurance that Musk’s Starships won’t continue to explode. But beyond that, SpaceX has not proven it can put a Starship in high orbit and bring it down safely with its so-far imaginary hypersonic rocket landing system. Then, we still have the problem of refueling a rocket in space successfully and safely, and the problem of all the launches necessary to provide that fuel. And many other problems, not the least of which is the cost. And this is for an unmanned Starship; the scientific and engineering issues multiply almost exponentially with humans aboard.
Musk himself admitted privately that a Mars mission in 2026 would have only a 50% success chance with unmanned ships, and that crewed versions are “decades away”. This means that the probability of any of this happening so soon, even with unmanned missions, is zero. And in fact, NASA’s own “realistic” estimates are that the initial Mars mission carrying humans will not be possible until 2035–2040. Plus, there is no agreement from NASA on any kind of Mars mission; there is talk and interest, but NASA’s budget identifies nothing specifically for Mars. And indeed, SpaceX allots precious little of its own R&D to anything related to Mars, and most of that research is necessary simply for a Starship earth launch and return.
Still, Musk continues to push the fantasy, and Tesla Oracle still tells us in July of 2025 that Elon Musk, the “vibrant entrepreneur” intends that the first Starship Mars mission will leave with Tesla Optimus robots by 2026. [5] But even the Oracle admits that “Elon Musk’s Starship Mars landing with Optimus timeline seems “pretty aggressive”. Both Tesla Optimus and Starship are in the prototype testing phase right now.” Prototype testing indeed; The Starship and the Optimus robots are in approximately the same condition as his Tesla Full Self-Driving software – “almost ready” every year for the past 12 years, and still nowhere.
A concept image of Elon Musk and Tesla Optimus humanoid robot on Mars as the landed Starship can be seen in the background. Credit: Grok-3 generative AI / xAI / X. Source:
Searching for Signs of Intelligent Life (on Earth)
Musk has claimed to be the “chief engineer” [6] who designed the rockets SpaceX will send to Mars – “a piece of cake”; “designing a rocket is easy; building it is hard”. [7] Elon Musk is not an engineer, and there is no evidence to support an assertion that he could even design a dipstick for a 1952 Ford, much less a rocket to Mars.
CNBC reported on Musk’s firm prediction that “We’ll Land Humans on Mars by 2026“. [8] This was delusional in the extreme, since NASA’s far simpler Artemis program won’t return to the Moon until 2026, and SpaceX hasn’t even tested a life-support system for deep space. Even with a longer timeline, the media had a field day with Elon Musk’s claim that “he” will build a city of a million people on Mars by 2050 at a cost of up to $10 billion a person. [9][10]
But we may not want to go to Mars. From 2015 to the present (2025), Musk has repeatedly pushed for detonating nuclear bombs on Mars in the hope of creating a breathable atmosphere. “Let’s Nuke Mars!” [11] Sane scientists say that nuclear fallout would make Mars toxic and uninhabitable, but Musk refuses to recognise that nuclear explosions are not an acceptable terraforming strategy.
Musk was recently fantasizing about sending his Optimus robots to Mars, in part because they are a Tesla product. Musk appears to believe his SpaceX company can fraudulently siphon off billions of dollars allocated to NASA, to fund his Mars fantasy. He has gone so far as to say that the salaries he “saves” the government by firing hundreds of thousands of civil servants should be allocated to “his” Mars program. [12]
In Elon Musk’s imagination, building a self-sustaining city on Mars would involve a cost of over $1,000 trillion, noting that this figure seems to exceed the total current US GDP of $29 trillion. But then, Elon Musk is not rated as a genius for nothing. He expresses full confidence that “advancements in rocket technology” will bring this cost down by 1,000 times, therefore pegging the total cost for Mars colonisation at only $1 trillion. That’s not only genius, that’s magic. And only one billion (or ten billion) dollars per person. Cheap.
Mars Conclusion
The only sensible (and obvious) conclusion is that this entire Mars escapade is just theater, a kind of marketing spectacle partly to distract from other Musk failures, and partly to disguise the reason for the very existence of SpaceX – which has nothing to do with Mars. Musk’s orbital parking concept and moon “colonisation plan” are simply absurd schoolboy fantasies, the entire plot being no more than a bedtime story for three-year-old children. A Mars dream may well exist but, until engineering and fantasy converge, what we are seeing is just smoke and mirrors – and with good reason.
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Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 34 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chap. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
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NOTES – Part 14
[1] Elon Musk: We’ll create a city on Mars with a million inhabitants
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/06/21/elon-musk-create-city-mars-million-inhabitants/
[2] NASA Appropriations and Authorizations:
https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R43419/R43419.118.pdf
[3] Elon Musk: A Million Humans Could Live on Mars By the 2060s
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/elon-musk-spacex-exploring-mars-planets-space-science
[4] Elon Musk: A Million Humans Could Live on Mars By the 2060s
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/elon-musk-spacex-exploring-mars-planets-space-science
[5] First Starship Mars mission to leave with Tesla Optimus by end of 2026, Musk gives timeline for human landings
https://www.teslaoracle.com/2025/03/16/first-starship-mars-mission-to-leave-with-tesla-optimus-by-end-of-2026-musk-gives-timeline-for-human-missions/
[6] Musk says he was chief engineer of SpaceX rockets
https://www.douyin.com/video/7464395072365251840
[7] Designing a rocket is a piece of cake. Building it is hard.
https://www.douyin.com/video/7465163461664853258
[8] Musk promised crewed Mars missions by 2026.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/28/elon-musk-says-he-wants-to-send-people-to-mars-in-10-years.html
[9] Elon Musk is convinced he will build a city of a million people on Mars by 2050 at a cost of up to $10bn a person.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/25/we-will-coup-whoever-we-want-the-unbearable-hubris-of-musk-and-the-billionaire-tech-bros
[10] Elon Musk: We’ll create a city on Mars with a million inhabitants
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/06/21/elon-musk-create-city-mars-million-inhabitants/
[11] Musk keeps pushing nuking Mars (2015–present) as a terraforming strategy.
https://www.space.com/elon-musk-nuke-mars-terraforming.html
[12] Musk Mars fantasies
https://www.douyin.com/video/7483706341458971923
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