--- title: Elon Musk's 2018 Mars Shot description: The hardware is shaping up for an early try at the Red Planet canonical: https://time.com/4311049/mars-musk-spacex-2018/ author: Jeffrey Kluger article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-04-28T21:50:13.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:55:42.838Z article:section: Science og:title: Why You Should Take Elon Musk's 2018 Mars Shot Seriously og:description: The hardware is shaping up for an early try at the Red Planet og:url: https://time.com/4311049/mars-musk-spacex-2018/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte10fd3780e562b92/698890e0cd1bba0ffd700729/20802118724_6f84936ce3_o.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 4267 og:image:height: 2400 og:image:alt: Mission (to be) accomplished: An artist's rendering of the SpaceX vehicle on Mars og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Why You Should Take Elon Musk's 2018 Mars Shot Seriously twitter:description: The hardware is shaping up for an early try at the Red Planet twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte10fd3780e562b92/698890e0cd1bba0ffd700729/20802118724_6f84936ce3_o.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Why You Should Take Elon Musk's 2018 Mars Shot Seriously > Sponsored content. 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Future Proof is free at time.com/newsletters. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-futureproof-2026q3/newsletters?i=613c34cc-a469-4f98-a27b-ff6fc765ac07&cr=time-nl-futureproof-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Mapping The Stars: How to Get to the Nearest Star in Twenty Years [Watch (HLS stream): Mapping The Stars: How to Get to the Nearest Star in Twenty Years](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/oJiBtWvc.m3u8) (4:13)  _Published 2016-04-13. Philip Lubin, physics professor at The University of California, Santa Barbara, explains how sending laser-propelled probes into outer space can further mankind's exploration and knowledge about our universe._  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Apr 28, 2016 9:50 PM UTC  Mission (to be) accomplished: An artist's rendering of the SpaceX vehicle on Mars Mission (to be) accomplished: An artist's rendering of the SpaceX vehicle on Mars Space X  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Apr 28, 2016 9:50 PM UTC NASA has some exciting news: a crewed landing on Mars is less than 20 years away. But NASA also has some less exciting news: a crewed landing on Mars has been less than 20 years away for the last fifty years. That’s the problem when a government agency is in charge of your space program. You can go only as far as the people in Congress and the person in the Oval Office let you go—which hasn’t been very far since the last Apollo astronaut left the moon. For that reason and more, you should pay attention to the April 27 announcement from Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, that he intends to launch his first unmanned Mars mission in just two years and will beat NASA’s goal of putting astronauts on the surface in the 2030s by up to a decade. Musk’s plan, which he announced in—what else?—a Tweet from SpaceX, was straightforward: > [](https://twitter.com/spacex/status/725351354537906176) Out of the gate, that was promising. A Dragon—specifically a Red Dragon—is just the kind of versatile ship you want for a Mars journey. The Dragon is the cargo vehicle that has made numerous uncrewed supply runs to the International Space Station, and will begin carrying astronauts as early as next year. Picture an Apollo spacecraft, but big enough to seat seven people instead of just three. Red Dragon is an in-development variation that lands on legs, under the power of engines, rather in the ocean under a parachute. The engines, which have performed well in early tests, are liquid-fueled and throttleable, which means you can step on the gas or ease back as needed—the kind of flexibility required for a soft landing on Mars. SpaceX has historically worked at a brisk clip and it’s not unrealistic to believe that the engines could be ready in time for a 2018 launch. That still leaves the landing legs to develop and test, but the company has already proven itself adept at that kind of technology, having twice used legs and foot pads to [bring the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket safely home](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYmQQn%5FZSys) after a launch. The real challenge for SpaceX is less the spacecraft than the rocket that will be used to get it off the ground in the first place. The company uses a modular system for its boosters: The first Falcon rocket had a single engine. The Falcon 9, as its name suggests, uses nine of them, and is what the company has used for its space station missions. A deeper-space mission would require a bigger rocket—the so-called Falcon Heavy, which will use three clusters of the same nine rockets on its first stage. That simple math means 27 engines—and 27 is an awful lot of ordnance to strap onto the bottom of a single booster. In one way it’s an improvement over the Apollo program’s Saturn V, which had just five far more powerful engines, since a flameout in even one of them would have been a mission-breaker. Lose one out of 27, however, and you can probably make it into space with barely a hitch in your step. The risks of a 27-engine system, however, may exceed that one benefit. For starters, there’s the complexity; the greater the number of engines you’ve got, the greater the number of variables—and parts—that can go south on you. Worse is the problem of vibration. Identical engines firing with identical thrust can set up a sort of violent harmonic—with the whole of their matching frequencies being greater than the sum of their parts. In other words, the rocket could shake itself to pieces. The solution is to introduce some _dis_\-harmony into the system, to design some of the engines to sing sharp or flat or otherwise off-key. That’s bad in a choir but very, very good in a rocket. For now, no Falcon Heavy has made it onto the pad, never mind into space, and the rocket is behind its originally announced schedule. Musk promises to rectify that with a test launch this year, which means that, again, while a 2018 Mars mission is not remotely a sure thing, it’s not remotely crazy either. Musk would make a number of uncrewed Mars landings—launching one every 26 months, to match the time Mars and Earth move into closest alignment—before attempting to send astronauts. NASA, which is continuing with its own crewed exploration plans on a slower track, has more than a little skin in the Red Dragon plan. In 2014, the space agency signed what is informally referred to as a [“no exchange of funds” agreement](https://www.nasa.gov/content/collaborations-for-commercial-space-capabilities-ccsc) with a number of companies, including SpaceX, in which the various partners swap assets for various projects. For a Red Dragon launch, that would mean NASA providing the launch pad and tracking and communication capabilities and SpaceX providing room on board for scientific and engineering payloads, and sharing all data about the approach and landing experience. The bigger, sexier question is whether all of this can really lead to boots on Mars in as little as a decade. Musk himself admitted one of the challenges, in a Tweet that followed his Mars announcement, conceding that no matter how good the Red Dragon is, its habitable volume is only about the same as an SUV’s, making it fine for Earth orbital or lunar missions, but way too small for a Mars trip. For that, you’d also need an attached habitation module, similar to the school-bus sized segments that make up the space station. And that’s not remotely all: you still need another habitat on the surface of Mars _and_ a liftoff system to get you back off Mars _and_ proper shielding to protect astronauts from deep space radiation en route—to say nothing of planning for the physical and mental toll a two and a half year round trip journey would take on the crew. Those too are reasons a mission to Mars has always been 20 years away. Musk, like every other space planner before him, must overcome them all. Still, the betting here is: He just misses the 2018 unmanned deadline, hits it in 2020 and has a better than even-money chance of getting astronauts on Mars in the early 2030s, beating NASA but not by much. Those are absolutely reliable predictions—unless they’re not. ## Transcript Why do people explore? You know that's really a profoundly interesting question. We've looked at the sky for as long as we've been alive and we've dreamed in stories and in movies of traveling to the stars. Why? We want to see what's out there. The problem is that while we can go to the moon, and while we actually have it within our power to go to Mars, we don't have a well defined way to get out to the stars. So what we're proposing. Is precisely that. A well defined and logical way to go to stars. Not with humans, but with robotic hopes. I'm a professor in the physics department at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This department is one of the Top ten departments in the country in physics. We have a group in our department, the experimental cosmology group, that we started in 1987. And it's a very dynamic group. Some of those students are also focused on applications of directed energy systems. The main mission behind the experimental cosmology group is to advance science and advance directed energy studies and its application. There's an aircraft flying overhead that you hear. That aircraft can only fly about the speed of sound. But that's way too slow to explore the stars. If you were to maintain that same speed and wanted to go to the nearest star, it would take you more than five million Ten years in that aircraft. In our system, with the smallest probes it could take as little as 20 years. If we wanna get to Alpha Centauri in 20 years, we have to take our ideas and scale them down. And in order to do that, we've set up a vacuum chamber to simulate space conditions. [ MUSIC ] The energy system is basically Like a laser pointer. Take a laser or a flashlight, turn it on, you direct energy. That means can be used for many purposes. When it's taken to extremes, it can be used to deflect an asteroid coming into the Earth. It could be used to propel a spacecraft. In order to get to the future Sure when you take small steps, I like to think baby steps. Some of those include just laboratory measurements of the thrust that you can get from a [ UNKNOWN ] and Asterope. The thrust you get from building spacecraft. You scale that up to large guild directed energy systems like what we're proposing, that forest becomes significant. Theoretically the wafer spacecraft is actually four inches. Inches by four inches, almost as thin as your hair. And these probes would literally be a spacecraft on a chip. The propulsion system is the laser, which stays [ UNKNOWN ] on the moon nearby. You fire it And then it's gone. If we reduce the spacecraft to a wafer, which we have things like imaging sensors, cameras for looking at the stars for orientation, and then a laser communication system to communicate back to the Earth. But keep in mind the same system, this is a very important point, the same system is used not just to send out one probe, but to send out And are monochromes. It takes about 10 minutes to accelerate a wafer to 30 % of the speed of light. And that's it. You can send a hundred per day or more. You can send nearly 40000 per year. Once we have thousands of space crafts out in space, we can look at many things out in space that we've never been able. To explore before, such as the solar gravity events, Alpha Centauri, and the closest star. When we really begin to look at the issues of sending humanity into interstellar travel it becomes very different than the movies. We're not really the ideal creatures to be traveling. Really what we want is not necessarily. To spread our bodies throughout the universe but to spread the capability of replicating ourselves, our spirit, our inquiry, our biological subsystems. Obviously you're going to start out with critics and people that are going to question you. But then we can actually see people starting to like our idea more and more and Like coming to it and I think that's really special and that's where the optimism comes from. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4311049/mars-musk-spacex-2018/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4311049/mars-musk-spacex-2018/"},"headline":"Why You Should Take Elon Musk's 2018 Mars Shot Seriously","datePublished":"2016-04-28T21:50:13.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:55:42.838Z","description":"The hardware is shaping up for a trip to the Red Planet—and soon","url":"https://time.com/4311049/mars-musk-spacex-2018/","keywords":["Space","NASA","Mars","Elon Musk","SpaceX","Apollo"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte10fd3780e562b92/698890e0cd1bba0ffd700729/20802118724_6f84936ce3_o.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Jeffrey Kluger","jobTitle":"Editor at Large","url":"https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/"}],"articleSection":"Science","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte10fd3780e562b92/698890e0cd1bba0ffd700729/20802118724_6f84936ce3_o.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Mission (to be) accomplished: An artist's rendering of the SpaceX vehicle on Mars","caption":"Mission (to be) accomplished: An artist's rendering of the SpaceX vehicle on Mars","creditText":"Space X","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/science/","name":"Science"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/space/","name":"Space"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4311049/mars-musk-spacex-2018/","name":"Why You Should Take Elon Musk's 2018 Mars Shot Seriously"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Mapping The Stars: How to Get to the Nearest Star in Twenty Years","description":"Philip Lubin, physics professor at The University of California, Santa Barbara, explains how sending laser-propelled probes into outer space can further mankind's exploration and knowledge about our universe.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/oJiBtWvc/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2016-04-13T15:27:44.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/oJiBtWvc.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/4311049/mars-musk-spacex-2018/","duration":"PT4M13S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/4311049/mars-musk-spacex-2018/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```