SpaceX Mars Mission Comes Under Fire From The World’s Top Mars Scholar

NASA’s ex-Administrator told Congress the U.S. is in danger of losing the new space race to the Moon due to SpaceX’s cascading delays in perfecting its Starship lunar lander. (Photo by Loren Elliott/Getty Images)

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Even as a backlash to SpaceX’s hold-ups in perfecting its Starship lunar lander builds across the U.S. Congress, Elon Musk’s new selection of Optimus robots to spearhead the ship’s first landings on Mars is triggering calls for radical revisions in his Martian mission plans.

Aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin, heralded worldwide for crafting the first intricate blueprints on colonizing Mars, including the rockets and robots pivotal to creating a second foundation for civilization on the Red Planet, tells me in an interview that Musk’s latest blueprints to send droids to Mars who are not trained as scientists risks sabotaging the entire mission.

Dr. Zubrin is likely the most influential scholar across the globe on designing a series of Mars flights by robots and then astronauts aimed at building a human outpost by tapping Mars’ natural resources and securing vital life support essentials while founding the first cosmopolis, shielded under a crystalline geodesic dome.

The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, Zubrin’s classic primer on building hyper-tech sanctuaries and terraforming Mars, restoring its ancient waterways and atmosphere while engineering a clone of Earth’s biosphere, has profoundly influenced leading-edge Mars scientists around the world.

His game-changing strategy to reach those goals, by deploying robots to capture oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, recover frozen water from the orange-red dunes, and begin producing methane rocket fuel for return flights to Earth, has gained followers among tech wizards stretching from NASA to SpaceX.

Two of SpaceX’s leading scientists on Mars joined forces with counterparts at NASA, and with space scholars across American campuses, to sketch out a grand design for the cascading Starship landings on the mysterious orb envisioned across the next decades.

“An ultimate objective of SpaceX is to develop self-sustaining cities on Mars, and current SpaceX architecture plans call for multiple Starship flights to be launched to Mars at every launch opportunity (~2 years),” SpaceX Mars Development Engineer Paul Wooster and co-authors write in a pathbreaking paper.

“The first set of Starships launched to Mars will be uncrewed and are intended to demonstrate the capability to successfully launch from Earth and land on Mars with human-scale lander systems.”

SpaceX’s first flotilla of its colossal capsules could shuttle an assembly of robot-scientists to the Martian sandhills, they add, “that could be used to conduct planetary science research either autonomously or through high-latency teleoperation.”

In the breakthrough study, “Accelerating Martian and Lunar Science through SpaceX Starship Missions,” the group proposed creating a borderless coalition of scientists, based at NASA, American universities and SpaceX itself, to co-explore Mars and search for life, all via robotic avatars on the desert sands.

In Elon Musk’s latest directive on the first five Starships to be be lofted to Mars, issued to his 200 million followers on the messaging platform X, the SpaceX founder said there is still a “Slight chance of Starship flight to Mars crewed by Optimus in Nov/Dec next year. A lot needs to go right for that.”

“More likely,” he added, “first flight without humans in ~3.5 years, next flight ~5.5 years with humans.”

Yet Musk’s preview of these history- and future-making missions never makes any mention of teaming up with the American space agency that has led Mars discoveries for decades, or the interplanetary coalition of Mars-based robots and Earth-based scholars proposed by his own lieutenants.

SpaceX now has an extraordinary chance to launch a fantastic robotic mission in 2028, Dr. Zubrin tells me, that could set out to uncover secrets of Mars that scientists have long wondered about, including whether life ever took hold there, and might still survive in underground refugia.

“It should not just land an Optimus,” Zubrin says.

“Landing a large payload on Mars is a chance to do a super Mars exploration expedition,” he says, “with platoons of rovers and helicopters bringing samples to a well-equipped lab in the lander.”

“Let’s land some helicopters that can have 50 kilograms of science instruments on them,” he told me in an earlier interview, during a live-streamed roundtable with space journalists and scholars hosted by Red Planet Live and its erudite anchor Ashton Zeth, who is also director of the Mars Society’s Ambassador Program.

“Life detection experiments,” Zubrin adds, could be processed in “a well-instrumented lab in the lander itself,” with the findings constantly beamed back to NASA, and to its partner scholars, via the Mars Relay Network.

These ground-based and aerial robots “can collect hundreds, thousands of samples from far away, bring them back to the Starship … and subject them to all the scientific investigations.”

If this massive, robot-augmented expedition to Mars, the greatest science mission ever conducted on another planet, were linked up with the coalition of space savants across academic centers and NASA outposts under the visionary plan outlined by SpaceX’s Paul Wooster and his co-authors, that would place SpaceX at the center of the world’s foremost web of Mars exploration.

Under this scenario, “teams of scientists and their grad students and undergraduate students from all over the United States and all over the world, from Allied countries,” could collectively join this expedition, predicts Zubrin.

“This is tremendous for science and it’s also going to be tremendous for public support for the program.”

If SpaceX wants its collaboration with NASA, and across the American Congress, to expand despite any changing of the guard ahead, Zubrin says, the world’s leading rocket maker needs allies across the political spectrum and across campuses spearheading space advances.

“We need the Starship mission to Mars to be a grand science mission,” Zubrin tells me, “both for the sake of science and to create a bipartisan foundation for the human Mars exploration program.”

“If humans to Mars is seen as a Musk hobbyhorse, being done while the Trump administration is wrecking NASA’s space science program,” Dr. Zubrin warns, “it will be dead as soon as the political fortunes of war shift.”

There are already signs that support for SpaceX is faltering across the halls of power in the Capitol, especially in light of the outfit’s failure so far to loft the Starship on its first flight test to reach the cratered crust of the Moon.

When NASA’s then-Administrator Jim Bridenstine unveiled a competition to design a Human Landing System for the Artemis III lunar touchdown—with SpaceX pitted against Blue Origin and Dynetics to develop the winning lander—he called for the mission to the Moon’s South Pole to take place by 2024.

SpaceX triumphed in that contest, and received a $2.89-billion NASA contract to provide its experimental Starship as the lunar descent module.

Yet during a recent hearing on the serially delayed Artemis III flight convened by Ted Cruz, one of the outstanding champions of NASA and of overall American space power in the U.S. Senate, Bridenstine testified that the aerospace agency is now in danger of losing the new space race to the Moon.

“We spent the latter part of the 20^th Century in a great power struggle with the Soviet Union,” Bridenstine recounted to the Senate’s most powerful backers of U.S. space advances.

“Thanks in part to the space program, we came out on top and spent the last 30 years as the world’s sole superpower.”

But now, he added, the U.S. is once again locked into a superpower space race, a contest to be the first to land on the Moon in the new millennium.

Without ever naming SpaceX, Bridenstine said: “The United States does not have a lander” that is now capable of reaching the silver orb’s South Pole.

“Unless something changes,” he warned, “it is highly unlikely the United States will beat China’s projected timeline to the Moon’s surface.”

The complicated technologies embedded in the SpaceX Starship, the most advanced spacecraft ever designed, and untested procedures including in-orbit refueling of the ship, are all pushing the craft’s first Moon landing farther and farther into the future, he predicted.

Bridenstine also pointed out that just eight years passed between President John F. Kennedy’s first call for NASA to land an American astronaut on the Moon and the fulfillment of that incredible quest in July of 1969.

“Apollo landed on the Moon in eight years,” Bridenstine said.

The new lander, he said, “has been under development for the same amount of time as the Apollo Program,” yet it “is unlikely to beat China’s projected timeline to the lunar surface.”

Senator Cruz underscored the urgency of shuttling NASA aeronauts back to the Moon, and then onwards to Mars, as global symbols of American space supremacy.

“Returning American astronauts to the Moon, preparing for human missions to Mars are not just scientific achievements,” Cruz declared. “They are fundamental to America’s role as the world’s leading spacefaring nation.”

Dr. Zubrin, meanwhile, a celestial White Knight, has presented Elon Musk with a technological roadmap to landing astronauts on the lunar surface by 2030, and on Mars right after that.

Zubrin tells me he has briefed SpaceX’s paramount leader on the potential to develop a mini-Starship, patterned after the original ship but with just one-fifth its mass, that could enable the outfit to drastically cut its refueling requirements in low Earth orbit, and on the Martian dunes.

SpaceX could rush to develop a miniaturized clone of the Starship, in time to allow NASA to win the new Moon race, Zubrin says, and then be the first ever to loft contingents of Allied astronauts to the ghosts of Martian waterways that might one day be brought back to life.