SpaceX is practically prepared to begin constructing a permanent human settlement on Mars with its massive Starship rocket.

The private spaceflight company is on target to dispatch its first uncrewed mission to Mars in as meager as four years from now, SpaceX’s author and CEO Elon Musk said Friday (Oct. 16) at the International Mars Society Convention.

“I think we have a fighting chance of making that second Mars transfer window,” Musk said in a conversation with Mars Society originator Robert Zubrin. You can watch a replay of the discussion here.

That window Musk alluded to is a dispatch opportunity that emerges like clockwork for mission to Mars. NASA, China and the United Arab Emirates all dispatched missions to defaces in July of this current year.

The following window opens in 2022 with Musk alluding to the 2024 Mars dispatch opportunity.

The mission will dispatch to the Red Planet on a SpaceX Starship vehicle, a reusable rocket-and-spacecraft combo that is presently being worked on at the company’s South Texas office. SpaceX is likewise wanting to utilize Starship for missions to the moon beginning in 2022, just as highlight point trips around the Earth.

Musk has since quite a while ago said that people need to set up a permanent and self-supporting presence on Mars to guarantee “the continuance of consciousness as we know it” — just in the event that planet Earth is left appalling by a something like an nuclear war or a space rock strike.

In any case, SpaceX doesn’t have any designs to really manufacture a Mars base. As a transportation organization, its solitary objective is to ship load (and people) to and from the Red Planet, encouraging the improvement of another person’s Mars base.

“SpaceX is taking on the biggest single challenge, which is the transportation system. There’s all sorts of other systems that are going to be needed,” Mars Society author Robert Zubrin said during the show.

“My personal hope is that we’re gonna see Starship in the stratosphere before this year’s out, and if Elon is right, reach orbit next year or the year after,” Zubrin included. “This will change people’s minds as to what is possible. And then, you know, we’ll have NASA seeking to fund the remaining pieces of the puzzle or entrepreneurs stepping forward to develop remaining pieces of the puzzle.”

In the event that Musk’s projections are right — he is known for offering excessively ambitious timetables — SpaceX’s first Mars mission would dispatch in the very year that NASA space explorers return of the moon under the Artemis program.

SpaceX is likewise intending to fly space travelers on a Starship mission around the moon in 2023. NASA has likewise picked SpaceX as one of three business groups to create moon landers for the Artemis program.

Musk said Friday that if not for the orbital mechanics that call for Mars dispatches at regular intervals, SpaceX “would maybe have a shot of sending or trying send something to Mars in three years,” Musk stated, including that Earth and Mars won’t be in the best position. “But the window is four years away, because of them being in different parts of the solar system.”

Musk uncovered designs for SpaceX’s Starship plans in 2016. The task means to dispatch a 165-foot (50 meters) spacecraft atop a huge supporter for profound space missions to the moon, Mars and somewhere else. Both the Starship and its Super Heavy supporter will be reusable.

This year, SpaceX dispatched two experimental drills of Starship models, called SN5 and SN6, from its Boca Chica test site in Texas. Those flights arrived at an altitude of 500 feet (150 meters).

SpaceX is presently setting up another Starship model, called SN8, for a 12-mile-high (20 kilometers) practice flight in the near future.