First Starship Mars landing set for 2027 with Optimus robots doing the colonizing

SpaceX plans to craft a Mars-ready Starship 3 rocket in 2025 and send five of those on a trip to the Red Planet in late 2026 with landing scheduled for 2027.

This jibes with the previous timeframe of 2026-2028 for sending rockets to Mars that Elon Musk revealed last year, as the so-called "transfer window" with suitable launch conditions appears every two years.

The 2026 mission to Mars won't be manned, but it will have Optimus robots on board and will "demonstrate key technologies for Mars transit and landing," tipped SpaceX.

When the orbital conditions are suitable for sending the next mission to Mars in 2028, SpaceX plans to launch up to 20 Starship rockets with greatly increased payload. Those will deliver the pilot infrastructure and equipment for the first human flight to Mars.

Subsequent launches will happen every other year, with up to 500 Starships landing in 2033 to increase "independence from Earth" by mining and processing resources on Mars to sustain the colony.

According to Elon Musk's "The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary" keynote presentation before SpaceX employees, at some point there will be a fleet of Mars rockets shuttling back and forth "like Boeing and Airbus make commercial airplanes."

Needless to say, this is all pie in the sky for now, and SpaceX has to successfully deploy the new Raptor 3 engine that saves more than a ton of vehicle mass first. The Starship 3 rocket that will be capable of going to Mars will have 42 engines, said Musk, clarifying that there was no way around that.

One thing that was conspicuously missing from the presentation is a timeframe for landing actual humans on Mars the way it was mentioned in similar presentations before.

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