San Francisco: Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Sunday said that the first uncrewed Starship mission will be launched to the Red Planet in two years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens. Starship is the world’s most powerful rocket and will be used to send humans to the Moon and then eventually to Mars.

In a post on X social media platform, the tech billionaire said that “the first Starships to Mars will launch in 2 years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens”. “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,” Musk announced.

According to him, flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years. “Being multi-planetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet,” said the X owner.

His aerospace company SpaceX has created the first fully reusable rocket stage and, much more importantly, made the reuse economically viable. “Making life multi-planetary is fundamentally a cost per tonne to Mars problem. It currently costs about a billion dollars per ton of useful payload to the surface of Mars,” informed Musk.

That needs to be improved to $100,000/tonnes to build a self-sustaining city there, “so the technology needs to be 10,000 times better. Extremely difficult, but not impossible,” he added.

SpaceX recently launched the third test flight of its 400-foot-tall Starship rocket, along with the Heavy booster. Starship consists of a giant first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 50 metres upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship.

The SpaceX CEO eventually plans to shift at least one million people to Mars. “Humanity should have a moon base, cities on Mars and be out there among the stars,” the X owner said.