on today's episode SpaceX is going to Mars blue origin is not going to Mars and China's mysterious space plane has just returned to Earth probably not from Mars Elon Musk is talking about Mars again and for the first time in a long time Elon is dropping his bold predictions on us about how the SpaceX Starship will establish a human presence on Mars within the next four years so this all started with Bill Amman the finance bro he made a post on X about health he wrote Let's make America healthy again which Elon then responded to by writing SpaceX created the first fully reusable rocket stage and much more importantly made the ReUse economically viable making life multiplanetary is fundamentally a cost per ton to Mars problem which seemed off topic anyway that led into some more technical information so right now it costs around $1 billion to send one ton of Mass from the Earth to Mars which is too expensive and that needs to improve to $100,000 per ton in order to build a self-sustaining City on Mars so that's going to require our technology to get around 10,000 times better which Elon says is extremely difficult but not impossible a few minutes later Elon elaborated on that concept a little further doubling down one more level of quote post and writing the first Starships to Mars will launch in 2 years when the next Earth transfer window opens these will be uncrewed to test the reliability of Landing intact on Mars okay so yes 2 years is not a very long time from now and yes Starship is still having some Kinks worked out as of right now but this shouldn't be particularly surprising Elon and SpaceX have been pretty open about the idea that as soon as Starship is able to reach Mars they are going full send this is the whole reason they've gone through the work of Designing and testing and building this rocket they're not interested in wasting any amount of time now having said that even though Mars is the primary objective you might remember that SpaceX has also promised Starship to NASA for the Artemis moon landing which is also supposed to happen in 2 years can SpaceX do both it's worth discussing at least emis was always a kind of side quest for Starship it's a great practical use case that would really help NASA out with their own very ambitious plan to establish a human presence on the moon as much as people rag on Elon for being overly optimistic I mean NASA's Artemis plan isn't exactly the most realistic thing I've ever seen either but it's reasonable to assume that SpaceX is looking at the Mars landing and the moon landing projects as something that can operate in parallel I mean we're talking about two totally different Mission profiles landing on the moon is nothing like landing on Mars and the lunar Starship has a primary mission to support a crew while the Mars ships would be purely cargo transports if anything the Mars Landing Hardware should be much easier than the lunar hardware and probably wouldn't take much away from Artemis if there even is an Artemis crew Landing I mean at this point it seems almost equally as questionable as elon's whole Mars Landing of course it's not like Starship doesn't have its own part to play in the em three timeline slippage there has definitely been some progress in the Rockets design over the course of four test flights and I feel like we really need to see what happens on flight five before making any judgments about where Starship is at in its development process if the next ship comes back down and lands without getting shredded by re-entry and if the next booster is caught by a robot launch Tower without exploding then I think even the most skeptical voices would have to admit that SpaceX is really on to something here one inescapable complication that needs to be acknowledged though is just the sheer volume of Starship operations that would be required to send at least two ships to Mars and at least two ships to the Moon that would be one demo landing and one crude Landing for emis all within the next 2 years if we keep the number of fuel transfer emissions at an even 10 per Starship in order to depart low earth orbits now we're at over 40 Starship launches with full payload on board just to support these two objectives and that doesn't accomplish any of the other goals SpaceX might have for Starship such as deploying starlink which Elon has also said is so important that if Starship didn't start launching starlink at a high flight rate within a year then SpaceX is at a genuine risk of going bankrupt and that was 3 years ago anyway Elon had even more to say he also wrote If These Landings go well then the first crude flights to Mars will be in 4 years so if we do it once without crashing then the next trip around is going to be loaded with some Brave volunteers luckily for those eager to offer themselves up as tribute those first Landings would be highly unlikely to go well that's not a knock against SpaceX or their ability to accomplish impossible goals it's just an observation of their own history that seems to show they need to screw it up a few times before they eventually get it right which is fine that's totally normal product development and I'm sure we'll hear from Elon himself many times that success is far from certain here's the last bit of elon's post flight rate will grow exponentially from there with the goal of building a self-sustaining City in about 20 years being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of Consciousness as we will no longer have all of our eggs literally and metabolically on one planet of course there's nothing new in involved here this is stuff we've heard musk say many times before but it's also the first time in a while he specifically laid out an upto-date timeline we know a lot more about the realities of Starship and space flight now than we did 10 years ago when Elon started talking about all this stuff and clearly his level of confidence in Starship to deliver a lot of results in a short amount of time it's just as high as ever what do you think though NASA has officially removed their escapade payload from the inaugural launch of the blue origin new Glenn rocket and there's something weird going on here the agency announced on September 6th that it will halt pre-launch preparations for the twin escape and plasma acceleration and Dynamics explorers satellites the spacecraft were scheduled to launch on the First Flight of the new Glenn between October 13th and 21st from Cape Canaveral in Florida the reasoning cited by NASA is all about timelines if Escapade is going to launch in a month then NASA needs to begin loading the spacecraft with hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide fuel right about now but if they go ahead with the prep of the spacecraft and then blue origin has to delay new Glenn for whatever reason then NASA has to go through the process of deten that spacecraft an official statement from NASA reads the decision was made to avoid significant cost schedule and Technical challenges associated with potentially removing fuel from the spacecraft in the event of a launch delay which could be caused by a number of factors of course blue origin is still very confident that everything will go to plan and new Glenn will be fully prepared for launch in less than a month from now we've seen Jeff Bezos doing the rounds in the media promoting blue origin and showing off their progress mostly on the everyday astronaut Channel they didn't ask us if we wanted to collaborate probably because we said very mean things about Jeff in the past anyway here's where things get weird though instead of trying to quick Shuffle to a different rocket provider NASA says that they still want to launch Escapade on new Glenn but now they're going to wait until September 2025 to do it so in theory that means that they're going to miss the home and transfer window by several months meaning that Escapade won't be taking the shortest path between the two planets so the trajectory of the mission will be pretty significantly changed from what it was originally intended to be not that this would be impossible we've known all along that Escapade is severely undersized for the power and capability of new Glenn so there's probably a decent amount of wiggle room in the flight trajectory they may be behind schedule by a few months but theoretically new Glenn can just push harder and make up the difference NASA's spokesperson Sarah Frasier told SPAC news.com quote the window depends on the spacecraft and Mission characteristics as well as the capabilities of the rocket blue origin themselves released only a vague statement saying we are supportive of NASA's decision to Target the Escapade mission for no earlier than spring 2025 and look forward to the flight the company said that the first flight of new Glenn will instead carry unspecified technology for its blue ring orbital transfer vehicle and flight one will also serve as the certification launch for the space Force's National Security space launch program the space force certification was originally intended to be on the second Flor flight of new Glenn which was scheduled for December but the company now says they'll move that launch up to November with no further details provided so first launch of new Glenn in October with the blue ring payload second launch in November with an unspecified payload and then another launch in the spring with Escapade that's a lot of hype to live up to there will blue come through China's experimental reusable space plane returned to Earth on September 5th completing its third orbital Mission Chinese State media issued a brief report to confirm the landing but provided no images or information regarding the mission or even the site of said Landing a statement from the report reads success of the experiment demonstrates the growing maturity of China's reusable spacecraft Technologies which will pave the way for more convenient and affordable roundtrip methods for the peaceful use of space in the future the space plane has been operating in low earth orbit since being launched on a long march to FR rocket for the third time last December probably not by coincidence that event happened 2 weeks before the launch of America's X-37B space plane on a falcon heavy rocket that also went to an undisclosed orbit China's space plane is thought to be more or less A reproduction of the X-37B all Chinese space plane missions have involved releasing a small satellite or object into orbit the second and third missions have seen the spacecraft appear to conduct a run de Vu and proximity operations with the object it released we're not sure what they're practicing for up there but it could involve retrieving repairing and maintaining Chinese satellites or potentially intercepting and screwing around with other nations spacecraft it's hard to say because China has maintained strict security around these missions the country's space authorities haven't even released any official images or even a description of the spacecraft