About feasibility of SpaceX's human exploration Mars missionscenario with Starship

Kurzfassung

After decades where human spaceflight missions have been reserved to low Earth orbit, recentyears have seen mission proposals and even implemented plans, e.g. with the mission Artemis I, forreturning to the lunar surface. SpaceX has published over various media (e.g., its official website,conference presentations, user manual) conceptual information for its reusable Starship to enablehuman exploration missions to the Martian surface by the end of the decade. The technological andhuman challenges associated with these plans are daunting. Such a mission at that distance wouldrequire excellent system reliability and in-situ-resource utilization on a grand scale, e.g. to producepropellant. The plans contain little details however and have not yet been reviewed concerning theirfeasibility. In this paper we show significant technological gaps in these plans. Based on estimatesand extrapolated data, a mass model as needed to fulfill SpaceX’s plans could not be reproducedand the subsequent trajectory optimization showed that the current plans do not yield a returnflight opportunity, due to a too large system mass. Furthermore, significant gaps exist in relevanttechnologies, e.g. power supply for the Martian surface. It is unlikely that these gaps can be closeduntil the end of the decade. We recommend several remedies, e.g. stronger international participationto distribute technology development and thus improve feasibility. Overall, with the limitedinformation published by SpaceX about its system and mission scenario and extrapolation from us tofill information gaps, we were not able to find a feasible Mars mission scenario using Starship, evenwhen assuming optimal conditions such as 100% recovery rate of crew consumables during flight.