SpaceX May Lose the Race in Mars Mission Following Reports of 2 Firms Also Sending Their Rockets to the Red Planet

Recent space reports revealed that SpaceX could lose the race when sending the first private space mission to Mars.

As indicated in a DNYUZ report, for several years, Elon Musk, SpaceX founder and chief executive, has been talking about making humanity an "interplanetary species" by one day sending colonists to the Red Planet.

The firm is constructing a giant spacecraft known as Starship with that goal. However, Relative Space, a new rocket firm and a small startup formed by an engineer who used to head the rocket engine development at SpaceX, announced yesterday its plans to send to Mars, a privately developed robotic lander.

Quite optimistically, the two firms say they could do it as soon as two-and-a-half years from now when the positions of Earth and the Red Planet line up again.

Cost of Mission

Chief executive and Relativity founder Timothy Ellis said the way SpaceX desired to do things, at the edge of crazy, not to mention ambitious and audacious, "was an inspiration."

He added that those goals attract the best people to work on them. He continued that they are more audacious than some other companies.

If a commercial mission on Mars succeeds, it could open a new market in which institutions, firms, and national space agencies could send payloads to Mars at a low cost.

That would be akin to how several companies are hoping to make money by spending payloads to the moon for paying customers, including NASA, beginning as soon as late 2022.

Promises

Ten years ago, a lot of space companies promised wealth from the mining of asteroids. However, they went out of business minus getting close to an asteroid.

Even Musk was routinely giving overly optimistic forecasts for the next milestone of SpaceX. For now, Ellis lacks the record of eventually attaining most of their big promises of Musk.

Relativity has yet to launch a rocket. The first-ever flight of its Terran 1 rocket might occur within a few weeks from Florida-based Cape Canaveral.

However, the Mars mission depends on a much larger rocket, Terran R, which is similar in terms of size, as well as the lifting capability to a Falcon 0, the main SpaceX rocket that has flown over 30 times so far this year, a report from The New York Times said.

Mars Landing

According to Ellis, that particular design is not scheduled to get off the ground until the latter part of 2024 or early 2025.

Impulse Space, the collaborator of Relativity, is an even younger firm with even less of a track record. However, Thomas Mueller, its founder, is a veteran in the space industry and was Employee No.1 when Musk initiated SpaceX in 2002. Mueller led the Merlin rocket engines' development, powering the Falcon 9 rockets.

Mars landing, arriving at approximately 12,000 miles an hour, not burning up in the atmosphere, and then coming to a stop on the ground in a single piece, only seven minutes after, falls in the classification of "challenging." Only China and NASA have had successful missions on the surface of Mars.

Once launched to space, the spacecraft of Impulse would detach from the rocket's upper stage and head on a nine-month voyage to the Red Planet.

Related information about the Mars landing of SpaceX and NASA is shown on The Space Race's YouTube video below:

Check out more news and information on Mars in Science Times.