Musk's Most Harebrained Idea Yet

Sending robots to Mars!

Photo by nader saremi on Unsplash

Musk has said some really dumb shit over the years. The only person who can realistically beat him when it comes to spouting bullshit is the Dorito Bonito himself. Occasionally, both men rabbit on about something that sounds like it could be true, but digging deeper exposes the cavernous extent of just how fallacious they are. For example, a few days ago, Musk posted this message on X: “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, first flight without humans in ~3.5 years, next flight ~5.5 years with humans. — Mars city self-sustaining in 20 to 30 years.” The statement “A lot needs to go right for that” is heavy lifting so hard that it puts Atlas to shame. So, strap in, and let’s dive down this rabbit hole.

Starship has had nine test flights so far. Yet, no Starship has entered Low Earth Orbit (LEO), no Starship has delivered a payload to LEO, it’s only been able to launch with less than 20% of its designed payload, it hasn’t even tried to demonstrate orbital cryogenic fuel transfer (which is crucial for its mission briefs), and no Starship has landed its upper stage successfully. Every launch has ended in “rapid unscheduled disassembly”, which is a gem of a euphemism, and one rocket even exploded before it launched while it was being refuelled.

Starship is significantly behind schedule and, at this point, functionally useless. Don’t forget, it was supposed to have landed on the moon by now.

Just for some comparison here: Saturn V, a rocket designed and operated by computers less powerful than my £20 Casio watch and built with techniques from the technological dark ages, had already successfully taken four crews to space and landed on the lunar surface twice by its ninth flight.

And here’s the crucial part — even if Musk somehow manages to get his giant penis extension to perform by November next year, a Mars mission is still never going to happen.

Starship can’t carry enough fuel during a launch to make it to Mars or the Moon. It needs to be completely refuelled in orbit by another Starship using a cryogenic fuel transfer.

But, as I detailed in this previous article, that may take some time. Starship has only taken a maximum of 20 tonnes to orbital speeds so far, and that put so much stress on the engines that they exploded before it reached orbit. However, Musk has stated that because it was a thrust issue that caused this problem, Starship should be able to take 45 tonnes to LEO. That is still less than half of what was promised, but let’s be generous and take him at his word.

In that case, it would take around 33 refuelling missions before this Mars-bound Starship could fire its engines, leave LEO, and head to Mars. Unfortunately, Starship is currently launching at a rate of once every two months. This rate is also unlikely to improve any time soon, as Musk needed Trump to deregulate the FAA to enable more flight licences, and that probably isn’t happening now that Musk has called him a pedo. This means the refuelling phase would take six years!

And that is being hugely generous. Again, Starship can’t even take half of this payload to orbital speeds without exploding in a giant fireball, even after more than a decade of development, nearly $10 billion spent on said development, and nine test flights. It has also yet to even try to demonstrate an orbital fuel transfer, let alone do it reliably.

Not to mention the fact that even with this enormous governmental generosity, this refuelling is not even close to being feasible.

Starship’s tenth test flight ended before it began, when the second stage exploded while being refuelled for a test fire (read more here). Now, before each flight, Starship’s second stage will undergo around two static test fires to ensure the engines are working correctly. With nine test flights, that means SpaceX has refuelled a Starship 28 times, including this catastrophic failure. As such, Starship has a roughly 3.5% chance of exploding while being refuelled on Earth.

Let’s be ungodly generous and say that refuelling in orbit has the same failure rate. That is, despite the extreme temperature differences and the brutal vacuum, radiation, and static that would make this far more hazardous than terrestrial refuelling. Well, the chance of all 33 orbital refuelling events not resulting in a mission-ending explosion that destroys both Starships is a mere 26%. So, even being generous and assuming Starship can actually make it to orbit, take a usable payload to orbit, and complete a cryogenic fuel transfer with the same safety margin as on Earth, a Mars-bound mission is more than likely to end in a fireball far closer to Earth than Mars.

This is why NASA doesn’t attempt orbital refuelling for its celestial missions, even though it could, in theory, greatly enhance them. Orbital refuelling is a gigantic failure point that is nearly impossible to mitigate. It’s best to just leave it alone.

But let’s assume Musk gets super lucky and manages to catapult a Starship into orbit and successfully refuel it. Well, after six years in the brutal conditions of space, those rocket engines almost certainly won’t work, as heat cycling, dust accumulation, warping and seizing will have ravaged them. That is why satellites use cold gas thrusters to manoeuvre, not rocket engines, as their simplicity means they can survive long periods in space. So, after a six-year wait and billions of dollars spent refuelling, the engines might very well refuse to turn on, like an old Austin Mini on a cold, wet morning. Meaning we will be left with a giant 1,200-tonne bomb orbiting the Earth. Great!

I can already hear the naysayers claiming that Starship will eventually be a reliable launch vehicle, likely due to Starship’s payload ballooning with every new version, which would significantly reduce all of these issues. And to that I ask: how? But, again, let’s be fair and assume they are right. Even then, a Mars mission still makes no sense.

SpaceX has tried to land the upper stage nine times now and functionally failed every single time.

Yes, a third of these tests, specifically the fourth, fifth, and sixth tests, conducted a controlled splashdown in the ocean. However, they had zero payload, which, thanks to the rocket equation, substantially reduces the rocket’s weight, given that it needs far less fuel. Moreover, all of these flights were several thousand miles per hour short of orbital speeds. Combined, this meant that for these tests, the kinetic energy during landing is significantly lower than a landing from orbit or a translunar or trans-Mars landing.

In other words, Starship’s tests show it isn’t capable of reliably landing on Earth. Even with vastly reduced kinetic energy to manage and a far simpler ocean splashdown, rather than a more complex landing on terra firma, it still fails two-thirds of the time!

And landing on Mars is even more challenging. Starship uses atmospheric drag and a “belly flop” manoeuvre to shed a significant amount of speed during its landings on Earth. This reduces the amount of fuel it needs to use during landing, which not only conserves fuel and increases its potential payload capacity when landing but also minimises stress on the rocket engines, making them less likely to fail catastrophically.

Mars’s atmosphere is also 100 times less dense than Earth’s, yet the landing speed and total kinetic energy are the same as an Earth landing. So, the rockets will need to do the vast majority of the work to slow down the vehicle, which means far more fuel must be carried, dramatically reducing the payload. It will also put substantially more stress on the rocket engines. These are the same rocket engines that blew up during Test 8, when the stress of launching just a few tonnes to Earth orbit caused a flash event in one engine, and the subsequent explosion destroyed the entire vehicle. The same engines are expected to survive a launch from Earth, then years in space during refuelling, where they are exposed to horrific conditions, a brutal firing to enter a trans-Mars flight, and then, months later, handle the stress of being the sole method of slowing down several hundred tonnes of steel travelling at 13,000 miles per hour.

These engines and their fuel systems can’t reliably survive taking a practically unladen Starship to a suborbital velocity without exploding, even after nine test flights. How the fuck are they going to be able to do all of that?

So, even if, by some miracle, Musk manages to get a Starship all the way to Mars, there is a seriously high chance it will flub the landing catastrophically.

Now, there is a new version of Starship’s engines coming soon. But this version creates more power by being pushed harder and is made lighter by removing heat shields and using more ablative cooling. That is a recipe for even more flash events inside the engine and will most likely increase the chance of catastrophic explosions. This engine is designed to solve the payload problem almost certainly at the cost of reliability. So, it will make this landing problem even worse.

But hold on, did you notice? Musk wants to send his Optimus humanoid robots on this doomed flight, which is almost as moronic a plan as using Starship to get to Mars.

For one, Optimus is utterly crap. Honda’s ASIMO had better capabilities in the early noughties (find out more here). Moreover, rivals from Boston Dynamics and China offer much more capable products than Musk’s shuffling Disney animatronics. So if you are going to send a humanoid robot to Mars, Optimus isn’t the one to send.

Plus, it actually makes zero sense to use humanoid robots at all, no matter how good they are.

Due to their unfixed nature, humanoid robots are unreliable in changing environments, and even the best fail at basic tasks at an alarming rate. They fall over and can’t get back up. They require serious amounts of energy and run out of battery rapidly (and energy is at a premium on the Moon and Mars).

Just these factors alone make them an imperfect choice for celestial exploration, but humanoid robots are also wildly inefficient. Humanoid robots are inherently flawed. We already have robots that can complete tasks faster, more consistently and more efficiently than the human form allows. For example, even the best humanoid robot couldn’t hand-weave cloth faster than an automated loom. This isn’t a limitation of robotics but of the human form. We evolved to be general-purpose and adaptable, so our form is not the ideal solution for specific tasks. So, why make a machine with the same limitations as us?

That is why NASA uses rovers, not humanoid robots, even though we have had some pretty cool humanoid robots for years. A rover is cheaper, lighter, more reliable, more controllable, and more capable.

So, why is Musk spending so much time, energy, and resources sending such an obviously flawed machine millions of miles away to a distant planet? Wouldn’t it be better if he partnered with a university or space agency and sent up a rover instead? That way, the entire effort could be useful, aid science, and help us understand this alien world. But that would get in the way of Musk’s childish PR stunts, wouldn’t it?

Oh, and guess what? After landing on Mars, Starship won’t have enough fuel to get home. A fuel synthesis plant needs to be set up that will use solar energy, water and CO₂ from the atmosphere to make fuel. However, Mars has essentially no accessible water, and its solar energy is only 43% of Earth’s. So, even though this technology exists, using it to synthesise the 1,200 tonnes of propellant needed to get home is functionally impossible.

So, if — and this is a bigger “if” than Musk’s ego — this Optimus-laden Starship lands on Mars, it will not enable a crewed Mars mission. Before that can even be considered, an actually usable method to refuel Starship on the red planet needs to be not just designed but thoroughly tested. And SpaceX has made no effort to do this.

Okay, so let’s round up this horrible mess.

Starship is currently functionally useless — it contains so many flaws that even getting it to the point where it can be theoretically used for a Mars mission in a year’s time is laughable. But, even if that does somehow happen, the mission’s extended timeline, thanks to slow refuelling, is untenable and could render critical components like rocket engines inoperable, all while having a high likelihood of creating a mission-ending explosion. And, even if Musk somehow rolls a double six and Starship reaches Mars, the chance of the rocket-heavy landing on Mars being successful is highly unlikely. However, if, somehow, they beat the insurmountable odds, their payload of a few crap C-3PO wannabes will be completely futile and actively fail to advance science or achieve Musk’s Mars ambitions. In fact, the one thing this mission should do — which is deliver and test a fuel synthesis machine, along with methods of reliably collecting CO₂ and water — it isn’t. And we know that because SpaceX isn’t developing a fuel synthesis machine, which it needs to if it is to be launched in a year’s time, or even three and a half years’ time, so that it can be deployed, tested and have enough time to stockpile fuel for a crewed mission in five and a half years’ time. If that doesn’t happen, the crewed flight will be a one-way suicide mission.

Honestly, it’s almost like Musk doesn’t know what he’s doing. Maybe, instead of making an earnest attempt to get to Mars, he is exclusively focused on gaining clout and pocketing billions of dollars in government money…

Truth be told, there is so much wrong with Starship that it can be challenging to see the big picture. That’s why Musk can get away with these stupid and insane statements. It’s difficult to pin down why he is wrong because he is so catastrophically wrong in such a dazzling variety of ways.

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Sources: Times of India, Will Lockett, Will Lockett, Will Lockett, Space.com, Space.com, Earthsky.org