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Trump Wants $1 Billion for Private-Sector-Led Mars Exploration
- U.S. President Donald Trump proposed a 2026 NASA budget allocating more than $1 billion to fund private-sector-led Mars exploration initiatives.
- The proposal builds on Elon Musk’s plans, announced in May 2025, to launch an uncrewed Starship crewed by Tesla-built humanoid robots to Mars by late 2026, with humans expected by 2028.
- The budget supports a new NASA program awarding contracts for developing spacesuits, communication systems, and human-rated landers, modeled after the agency’s lunar payload approach.
- Musk imagines sending 1,000 to 2,000 Starships to Mars every few years to establish a self-sustaining city by 2050, painting a striking vision of Optimus navigating the Martian landscape.
- The budget faces opposition from lawmakers defending moon programs, while experts highlight technical challenges like orbital refueling before rapid Mars transit becomes feasible.
18 Articles
18 Articles
3 months transit time to Mars for human missions using SpaceX Starship
Historically, spacecraft have followed trajectories that took between six and nine months to reach Mars, using traditional chemical propulsion on roughly Hohmann transfers. It is commonly believed that advances in propulsion technology, such as nuclear thermal or VASIMR, are necessary to reduce that transit time. In this paper, we show the feasibility of transit to Mars using the SpaceX Starship taking 90 days. We outline two trajectories that r…
Missions to Mars with the Starship Could Only Take Three Months
In a recent paper, UCSB physicist Jack Kingdom identified a trajectory for a rapid transit (90 days) to Mars using SpaceX's Starship. This proposal offers an alternative to mission architectures that rely on nuclear propulsion to reduce transit times.
At that time, only robots would travel, but the plan is to have one million human Mars colonists by 2050.
Mars by 2026? The 4 key takeaways from Elon Musk's Starship update
SpaceX's billionaire founder Elon Musk says that despite Starship setbacks, the space company hasn't taken its eyes off the ball — and that ball is big, red, and roughly 140 million miles away. In a 42-minute video posted to X on Thursday evening, Musk laid out a plan to launch the mammoth spacecraft to Mars for the first time as early as next year. His ultimate vision has been to use a fleet of Starships to send 1 million humans to Mars by 2050…
A physicist from the UCSB (University of California Santa Barbara) has identified two trajectories that could reduce transits to Mars with Space X's Starship to between 90 and 104 days.
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