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Starship's timeline depends on future test-flight progress

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Orbital refueling remains a major hurdle to overcome

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End of 2026 window is when planets align, missing deadline

would

delay by two years

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NASA aims for Starship moon mission as step to Mars in

2027

By Steve Gorman and Joey Roulette

LOS ANGELES, May 29 (Reuters) - Two days after the

latest in a string of test-flight setbacks for his big new Mars

spacecraft, Starship, Elon Musk said on Thursday he foresees the

futuristic vehicle making its first uncrewed voyage to the red

planet at the end of next year.

Musk presented a detailed Starship development timeline in a

video posted online by his Los Angeles area-based rocket

company, SpaceX, a day after departing the administration of

U.S. President Donald Trump as head of a tumultuous campaign to

slash government bureaucracy.

The billionaire entrepreneur had said earlier that he

was planning to scale back his role in government to focus

greater attention on his various businesses, including SpaceX

and electric car and battery maker Tesla Inc. ( TSLA )

Musk acknowledged that his latest timeline for reaching Mars

hinged on whether Starship can accomplish a number of

challenging technical feats during its flight-test development,

particularly a post-launch refueling maneuver in Earth orbit.

The end of 2026 would coincide with a slim window that

occurs once every two years when Mars and Earth align around the

sun for the closest trip between the two planets, which would

take seven to nine months to transit by spacecraft.

Musk gave his company a 50-50 chance of meeting that

deadline. If Starship were not ready by that time, SpaceX would

wait another two years before trying again, Musk suggested in

the video.

The first flight to Mars would carry a simulated crew

consisting of one or more robots of the Tesla-built humanoid

Optimus design, with the first human crews following in the

second or third landings.

NASA is currently aiming to return humans to the surface of

the moon aboard Starship as early as 2027 - more than 50 years

after its last manned lunar landings of the Apollo era - as a

stepping stone toward ultimately launching astronauts to Mars

sometime in the 2030s.

Musk, who has advocated for a more Mars-focused human

spaceflight program, has previously said he was aiming to send

an unmanned SpaceX vehicle to the red planet as early as 2018

and was targeting 2024 to launch a first crewed mission there.

The SpaceX founder was scheduled to deliver a live webcast

presentation billed as "The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary"

from the company's Starbase, Texas, launch site on Tuesday

night, following a ninth test flight of Starship that evening.

But the speech was canceled without notice after Starship

spun out of control and disintegrated in a fireball about 30

minutes after launch and roughly halfway through its flight path

without achieving some of its most important test goals.

Two preceding test flights in January and March failed in

more spectacular fashion, with the spacecraft blowing to pieces

on ascent moments after liftoff, raining debris over parts of

the Caribbean and forcing scores of commercial jetliners to

change course as a precaution.

Musk shrugged off the latest mishap on Tuesday with a brief

post on X, saying it produced a lot of "good data to review" and

promising a faster launch "cadence" for the next several test

flights.

(Reporting by Joey Roulette in Washington; Writing and

additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by

Lincoln Feast.)