Elon Musk's mission to Mars could RUIN the Red Planet, scientist warns - as the SpaceX CEO reveals plans to set up a city there by 2054
- A leading scientist warns that Elon Musk's plans could 'contaminate' Mars
This week, Elon Musk made the staggering claim that a city of one million people will be thriving on Mars within 30 years.
Now, a leading scientist has warned that Musk's plan could prove disastrous.
Professor Andrew Coates, a physicist and Mars researcher from UCL, argues that human settlers would contaminate the planet and jeopardise the search for alien life.
He claims humanity should only send a single astronaut to Mars if we ever want to learn the truth about life in our solar system.
Speaking on the Today Programme, Professor Coates said: 'The last thing we need to be doing is taking life from Earth to Mars. Robotic exploration is the way to go.'
As Elon Musk shares his plans for a city of one million people on Mars by 2054, a leading scientist has warned that this could be disastrous (file photo)
On October 13, SpaceX successfully landed the Super Heavy booster on its launch platform where it was caught by a pair of mechanical arms
Musk's new claims about the future of human exploration on Mars come as SpaceX makes its biggest breakthrough to date.
On October 13, the company successfully landed its 71-metre-tall (242 ft) Super Heavy booster.
The booster carried a 3,000-tonne rocket 40 miles (65km) into the air before detaching and guiding itself back to the launch pad where it was caught in the chopstick-like 'Mechazilla' arms.
The booster is the largest ever designed by SpaceX and is needed to carry the huge Starship spacecraft into orbit.
This success raised hopes for cheaper, more efficient space travel capable of carrying settlers and resources to Mars.
Writing on X shortly after the successful landing, Elon Musk claimed that a city of one million people would be thriving on Mars within the next 30 years
Musk has claimed that Starship (pictured) and Super Heavy will make it possible to send huge quantities of cargo and crew to Mars
Writing on X shortly after Super Heavy's landing, Musk said: 'If civilization is reasonably stable for the next ~30 years, a self-sustaining city of a million+ people will be built on Mars.'
However, Professor Coates warns that building a human settlement on this scale would create serious problems for scientists.
Professor Coates is part of the team developing the NASA Rosalind Franklin rover mission which will drill beneath the Martian surface to look for signs of microbial alien life.
By sending human explorers to the red planet, SpaceX would inevitably be contaminating the surface with biological material.
This contamination would make it much more difficult for researchers like Professor Coates to spot the subtle signs of past or present alien life on the planet.
Professor Coates said: 'Eventually Elon Musk would like to be taking people to the moon and potentially onto Mars but I think we have to be a bit careful with the latter one.
On X, Elon Musk's frequent collaborator and former SpaceX mission captain Jared Isaacman shared an artist's impression showing several Starship spacecraft outside a Martian settlement, asking: 'Do you believe now?'
'We have to be very careful in the way we prepare missions, doing lots of cleaning of the technology, to make sure we're not taking life to Mars and measuring that. That's the last thing we want to do.'
Musk has frequently said that the Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster would be critical for establishing a permanent presence on Mars.
Mars only comes close enough to Earth for interplanetary travel once every 26 months, making the window for launches extremely short.
Establishing a city on Mars would require launching millions of tonnes of cargo and passengers in this brief window.
If Elon Musk uses Starship (pictured) to take hundreds of humans to Mars as he claims is possible, this will make it much harder to identify if any signs of life originated on Mars
Musk hopes that the high capacity and reusability of Starship and Super Heavy will make this possible.
And with the successful landing of the Super Heavy booster, this outlandish goal is suddenly looking more realistic.
However, scientists have warned that a mass colonisation project on Mars could destroy any evidence of life on the planet.
Some researchers have even warned that the arrival of humans could wipe out fragile life which could currently be living on Mars.
Professor Coates said: 'One of the stated aims is to eventually take a million people to Mars and I would definitely draw the line at that.'
Scientists have been using rovers such as Curiosity (pictured) to study the Martian surface. But even a single visiting human could leave behind contamination that these sensitive machines would detect
Musk hopes that the reusable Super Heavy boosters (pictured) will make travel to Mars cheaper and more efficient
Professor Coates does believe that humans may be able to walk on Mars one day but that numbers will need to be strictly controlled.
He said: 'One person may be okay eventually, but there are risks of contamination.'
However, Professor Coates does say that SpaceX's Starship spacecraft will allow humans to return to the moon in larger numbers.
Starship, the spacecraft carried by the Super Heavy booster, has already been slated as NASA's vehicle of choice to return to the lunar surface.
During the test, SpaceX demonstrated that it was able to land the booster back on the launch pad. In the future this could mean a Super Heavy booster could relaunch once every hour, blasting thousands of tonnes of material towards Mars
The space agency has said it would like to use a modified version of Starship for the Artemis missions which will land the first Americans on the moon since the Apollo era.
'The moon is absolutely no problem, we can do that', Professor Coates said.
That is because, unlike Mars, the moon has none of the ingredients that are necessary for life - meaning there is no risk of biological contamination.
He concludes: 'It is a fantastic thing to have been able to do this with a very large rocket, it eventually helps us to get back towards humans exploring the moon — which I have no problem with —but I think we are going on to Mars with a lot of people and that is where we have to start worrying.'
