The Road to Mars: What Those Five Landings Might Look Like

Elon Musk plans to land Starships on Mars in 2026:

In a longer post here, he clarifies that there will be five uncrewed Starships that will attempt landing, to be followed by humans two years later if all goes well with the uncrewed landings.

With a little pen and paper analysis, we can narrow down what this is going to look like — and what future earthbound missions will look like as they validate concepts for use on Mars.

Why Five?

This is really two questions tied up:

Why more than one?

and

Why not whatever the logistical maximum number of Starships you can get to Mars in that time?

There needs to be more than one for two important reasons — first, that you simply cannot land all of the material needed to set up a return mission with a single Starship — you need a tanked of cryo-cooled hydrogen, you need either deca-football fields of solar or several Starships filled with Kilowatt-style nuclear reactors. You also need gear to drill wells for water, and finally, you need a plant for the…