Humanity's chances of setting foot on Mars before the end of the decade are beginning to fade as leading Martian transport developer Elon Musk has pushed back his target date for reaching the red planet again.
In 2016, the SpaceX founder unveiled his grand ambition to set up a city on Mars. At that time, Musk hoped to see a crewed mission to our planetary neighbor happen as soon as 2024. Since then, the company has made a lot of progress in building its Mars rocket, but not quite fast enough to meet that initial timeline.
On Wednesday, Musk revealed on Twitter that he now sees 2029 as the earliest date humans might first step on Mars. That would be 60 years since the first moon landing in 1969.
As recently as December of 2020, Musk was aiming for 2026.
Starship, which SpaceX is designing to take astronauts to the moon for NASA and eventually to Mars, has made some successful high-altitude flights, but has yet to make it to space.
Musk has made noise over the past two years about federal launch regulations slowing the process of reaching Mars and recently even floated the specter of bankruptcy if SpaceX isn't able to produce Starship's raptor engines more rapidly.
Unsurprisingly, getting to Mars takes planning. As Mars and Earth move around the sun, the two planets move closer to one another and then farther away again. To take advantage of the times when the trip between the two worlds is shortest requires launching during certain windows. The ideal Mars launch windows for this decade are later this year, late 2024, late 2026 and late 2028/early 2029.
It's looking as though Musk's initial ambitions may have been overly optimistic. If his target date slips much further, into the 2030s, it will be more in the ballpark of when NASA has always been aiming in terms of sending the first astronauts to Mars.
While space tourism may have begun to blossom in the last year, we're unlikely to see commercial expeditions to the red planet for a while longer.
If you stumble across a tweet from Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, you might notice the billionaire's Twitter name has changed. The prolific tweeter now lists himself as "Elona" Musk, and there's a reason. It will probably surprise no one it's a very tangled story.
On Monday, Musk challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin to "single combat" over the war in Ukraine.
"I hereby challenge (Vladimir Putin) to single combat," Musk wrote in his tweet. "Stakes are (Ukraine)."
Putin didn't respond publicly. But on Tuesday, Musk shared a post on the messaging app Telegram from Ramzan Kadyrov, the pro-Putin head of the Chechen Republic. In the post, Kadyrov taunts Musk by telling him to "pump up those muscles in order to change from the gentle (effeminate) Elona into the brutal Elon you need to be
He goes on to tell Musk to train his muscles at various Russian or Chechen locations.
After that post, Musk changed his display name on Twitter from "Elon Musk" to "Elona Musk." Twitter users can change their display name easily -- it's the name that shows up in bold above a person's Twitter user name. Musk left his user name as @elonmusk -- probably a smart decision, because if he changed that, someone else could take the "elonmusk" user name and use it for any number of reasons.
Musk also responded to Kadyrov with a tweet signed "Elona."
"Thank you for the offer, but such excellent training would give me too much of an advantage," Musk tweeted. "If (Putin) is afraid to fight, I will agree to use only my left hand and I am not even left-handed. Elona"
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