Musk says humans can be on Mars in four years. Many laugh, but some see purpose

The SpaceX boss has envisioned people staying on the red planet in a self-sustaining city in 20 years

Almost buried beneath a recent avalanche of rightwing invective posted by Elon Musk on the platform he owns, X, was one eye-popping statement that made space watchers sit up and take notice: an assertion that humans could land on Mars within four years and be living there in a self-sustaining city in 20.

It seemed a fanciful boast, even by the standards of the SpaceX founder and world’s richest man, who transformed the logistics and cost of shorter-duration, near-to-Earth orbit space travel with his fleet of reusable Falcon rockets. The US government space agency, Nasa, which is collaborating with SpaceX over knowledge and technology to get astronauts to the red planet, believes a first crewed landing by 2040 would be “audacious”.