According to Musk, if Vice President Kamala Harris becomes president, it could spell disaster for humanity — and it would probably even put the brakes on our chances (well, SpaceX’s chances, not exactly ours) of colonizing Mars.
Musk, a vocal Trump supporter and a conservative (but not a conventional conservative either, considering even Republican parents are often present for their kids), took to his X (formerly Twitter) to express his concerns.
“A Kamala Harris administration would guarantee the growth of the bureaucracy currently strangling America,” Musk wrote. He went further, claiming such an administration would destroy NASA’s Mars program and pose an existential threat to human survival. Musk described the upcoming election as “a fork, maybe the fork, in the road of human destiny.”
SpaceX plans to launch about five uncrewed Starships to Mars in two years.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 22, 2024
If those all land safely, then crewed missions are possible in four years. If we encounter challenges, then the crewed missions will be postponed another two years.
It is only possible to travel from… https://t.co/dzi03Hnyhg
His comments come amid ongoing disputes with federal agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which Musk has accused of hindering SpaceX’s progress. Musk has even threatened legal action against the FAA after it imposed fines on SpaceX over unapproved changes to rocket launches. The SpaceX founder has argued that these regulatory slowdowns jeopardize his long-term vision of making humanity “sustainably multi-planetary.”
Much like many dystopian films and even a CW show called “The 100,” Musk believes that establishing colonies on other planets is essential to safeguard humanity against catastrophic events such as nuclear war or the emergence of a deadly supervirus. He’s previously warned about various apocalyptic scenarios, ranging from population collapse and artificial intelligence takeovers to asteroid impacts and the eventual destruction of Earth by the sun billions of years from now.
Musk founded SpaceX with the ultimate goal of colonizing Mars, and despite regulatory obstacles, the company has ambitious plans. On Sunday, Musk announced that SpaceX aims to launch five uncrewed Starship megarockets to Mars within the next two years, with crewed missions potentially beginning by 2028.
And while the X owner believes that it is Harris who will seriously halt his dream of taking people to Mars, experts caution that his Mars plan is already a long shot, even without the political challenges. Despite his recent announcement that SpaceX intends to send five uncrewed Starship rockets to Mars by 2026, and potentially crewed missions by 2028, many analysts believe that Musk’s timeline is overly ambitious.
One of the key hurdles Musk faces is the enormous engineering challenge of getting a spacecraft to Mars. While SpaceX has successfully tested its Starship rocket, getting it to Mars requires overcoming significant technical obstacles. For one, Starship needs to be refueled in space—a technology that has yet to be perfected.
According to Philip Metzger, a former NASA scientist, each Starship would need at least four refueling flights to make the journey to Mars. With SpaceX planning to launch five Starships in the 2026 window, that means a staggering 25 rocket launches would need to take place in a short period of time.
The timing is critical. Mars missions must be launched within a specific window that occurs only every 26 months, when the orbits of Earth and Mars are closest. Missing that window would set SpaceX’s plans back by years. Experts like astrophysicist Peter Hague point out that while SpaceX is pushing boundaries, scaling from occasional launches to the dozens needed for a Mars mission in just a few years is a monumental task. Hague suggests that crewed missions by 2031 or 2033 might be more realistic than Musk’s 2028 goal.
In all honesty, though, SpaceX not being able to take us to space might not be such a bad thing after all, considering Musk also “dreamed” of giving people “free speech” and claims to have bought Twitter to exercise just that — and we can all see how that is going.