As Donald Trump took his second oath of office on Monday, he pledged to send American astronauts to Mars.
“The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons,” Trump said during his inaugural address. “And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”
Billionaire Elon Musk of SpaceX threw his hands up in the air, and the audience applauded as Trump made the Mars announcement.
Later on in the day, Musk, who is now heading the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), designed to cut costs in government, also weighed in on Trump’s announcement. “Thank you. My heart goes out here. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured. Thanks to you, we’re gonna have safe cities—finally, safe cities. Secure borders. Sensible spending. Basic stuff. And we’re gonna take DOGE to Mars. I mean, can you imagine how awesome it will be to have American astronauts plant the flag on another planet for the first time?” Musk said.
The United States faces complex challenges in space policy. China has plans to send astronauts to the moon by 2030 and establish a crewed lunar research station in collaboration with Russia over the next decade; this is a move the United States is unlikely to let go unchallenged. Meanwhile, orbital lanes are getting congested and launch windows are tightening, making it crucial that governments create new regulations for space travel.
But Trump and Musk remain optimistic that the American flag will fly on Mars in the near future. However, they face the challenge of setting out the specifics of how, and when, that will be achieved, and experts say their timeline is unrealistic.
Newsweek has contacted the White House for comment via email.
Musk’s SpaceX company has a clear objective of “Mission Mars,” which aims to establish a sustainable human presence on the red planet and eventually set up a self-sufficient human colony in what Musk has described as humanity’s “backup plan.” As part of that program, Musk has previously said he plans to send an uncrewed Starships to Mars as early as 2026 and crewed missions by 2028.
Trump has also set out a broad timeline, telling his supporters at a campaign rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 9 that the United States will reach Mars by the end of his term, in January 2029.
“We will lead the world in space and reach Mars before the end of my term,” Trump said. He did not specify whether he meant landing humans on Mars or an uncrewed spaceflight.
NASA is researching several technologies necessary to send humans to Mars and back “as early as the 2030s.”
However, experts say such a timeline is unrealistic. Bleddyn Bowen, from the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University in the U.K. told Newsweek that the time frame set out by Musk and Trump is not viable at all.
“There’s no realistic time frame at all for such a thing. It requires huge resources that nobody is committing for a human landing on Mars,” Bowen said.
Experts also highlighted the potential safety risks of sending astronauts to Mars so soon. “To push for an early date risks a catastrophic and traumatic (and potentially embarrassing) failure,” Kani Sathasivam, professor of international relations at Salem State University in Massachusetts, told Newsweek.
“The key obstacle remains that our engines are still not fast enough, and the overly lengthy time it would take to travel to Mars exposes those humans to too much deadly, potentially fatal, radiation, for which we don’t yet have sufficient protective technology. So, we will need a huge breakthrough in either propulsion technology or radiation protection technology, or ideally in both.”
Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, highlighted the absence of critical technologies such as life-support systems and infrastructure that are critical for a mission to Mars when there is only a small window that exists for humans to travel to the planet.
The brief launch windows to travel from Earth to Mars are dictated by the orbital mechanics of the two planets. Earth orbits the Sun faster than Mars, so an optimal alignment—when Mars is closest to Earth—occurs roughly every 26 months. During this time, a spacecraft can follow an elliptical path to intersect Mars’s orbit using minimal energy. These windows last only a few weeks, as the planets’ relative positions quickly change, making the journey far more difficult and fuel-intensive outside of this period. Precise timing is critical for successful Mars missions, with the next window occurring in October 2026.
“Sending humans to Mars is dramatically more difficult than sending humans to the moon. In addition to its distance from Earth, there are only two brief windows of time in the next four years when the planets are literally aligned to allow for launches to Mars,” Dreier said.
“Even if Starship were ready in time for those launch windows, there would need to be life-support systems, new communications capabilities, significant increases in hardware reliability, established infrastructure, and many other technologies that do not exist yet. Rockets are the easy part. That doesn’t mean getting to Mars is impossible, far from it. But getting there in four years from our current point almost certainly is,” Dreier added.
Richard M. Anderson, bioanalyst and author, told Newsweek that, for astronauts to safely go to Mars, there would need to be extensive rehabilitation for astronauts when they return from the planet due to the effects of weightlessness on the human body. But no one has committed to providing such rehabilitation yet, he said.
“Long-term astronauts returning from the space station cannot walk after they land on Earth. They need extensive rehabilitation. Who’s to provide that for the first people to land on Mars? There is a solution to that with the use of rotating spacecraft. I have seen no plans from either NASA or Elon Musk to use such spacecraft,” Anderson said.
As well as the safety concerns, there also exists the issue of how the government would fund such an expedition to Mars, which would cost between $100 billion and $500 billion per mission, according to some estimates, in such a short space of time.
“The costs will be enormous,” Dr. P.J. Blount, assistant professor of Space Law at Durham University. “The U.S. taxpayer is unlikely to want to bear the costs of such a program, even if it is being bought from commercial companies, which is often perceived as more efficient than originating technologies in government. This is bombast that has not been thought through from a policy perspective.
“I know that many in the space community find this to be exciting and want to believe the hype behind such an announcement. Mars is exciting. However, after seeing Elon Musk’s speech at the inauguration, I think we have to ask ourselves whether getting to Mars is worth the moral costs in addition to the economic costs and potential risks to human lives,” Blount continued.
Trump has not yet set out a plan for how a mission to Mars would be funded. But it could involve cutting NASA’s Artemis program, which would see humans return to the moon in 2026 for the first time since 1972. The program was a key initiative led by Vice President Mike Pence as chair of the National Space Council and space policy expert Scott Pace during Trump’s first term.
But there are already indications that the initiative could take a backseat in Trump’s second administration, with Musk taking the helm at DOGE. On Christmas Day in 2024, Musk wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “The Artemis architecture is extremely inefficient, as it is a jobs-maximizing program, not a results-maximizing program. Something entirely new is needed.”
Dreier warned about cutting the Artemis program: “Pulling away from the Artemis program and reorienting to the moon would be profoundly disruptive to NASA, our allies, and the commercial sector that has built up around the claim that the U.S. was going to establish a sustained presence at the moon. It would also leave the future of lunar exploration to China, something the president and his allies in Congress would have little appetite for,” Dreier said.
Many in the space industry now fear Trump administration will also cancel NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion space programs in an attempt to cut costs.
Debuting in 2022 with the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission to the moon, the SLS is a single-use rocket with a price tag of around $4.1 billion per launch. In contrast, SpaceX is working to reduce the cost of a single Starship flight to under $10 million.
The SLS is designed to launch the crewed Orion spacecraft to the moon by 2026, but the crew capsule has faced issues with its heat shield that a recent audit determined threatens safety of the astronauts. This means the SLS and the broader architecture of the Artemis program are likely to come under close scrutiny by Congress, while the White House could halt the development of the SLS in favor of reusable rocket Starship for its Artemis program, even as NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free urged the incoming administration to maintain the current plans.
But Musk has dismissed any concerns around cutting programs that would take the U.S. to the moon again. “We’re going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction,” he wrote on X earlier this month.
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