Elon Musk Predicts That Humans Will Live on Mars Within 20 Years

Fresh off a successful mission to rescue NASA astronauts stranded at the space station on Tuesday, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk predicted humans will live on Mars within 20 years during a podcast with Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

“You need Mars to become self-sustaining and be able to grow by itself before the resupply ships from Earth stop coming,” Musk said in the podcast posted Wednesday. “That is the critical civilizational threshold beyond which the probable lifespan of civilization is much greater.”

While Musk believes 20 years is a realistic timeframe for a Mars colony to flourish, it would require massive resources, a large population, and a habitat capable of sustaining life in Mars’ thin atmosphere and extreme temperatures.

“A few people running around on the surface of a hostile environment is not going to make it self-sustaining,” Musk said. “You’re going to need on the order of one million people, and a million tons of cargo.”

Establishing a self-sustaining colony on Mars, Musk said, isn’t just about sending people—it’s about rebuilding the fundamental systems that support civilization.

On planet Earth, “we’re at the top of a massive pyramid of industry that starts with mining a vast array of materials, which go through hundreds of steps of refinement,” he said. “We grow food, trees, and make things from them. You have to build all that on Mars, which is a hostile environment.”

On Friday, Musk said that SpaceX plans to launch a Starship to Mars in 2026, carrying Tesla Optimus Robots. If all goes well with that mission, then humans are expected to launch to Mars in 2029.

Since founding SpaceX in 2002, Musk has prioritized colonizing the Red Planet. He has even pledged to donate his sperm to “help seed a colony,” according to a New York Times report that cited unnamed sources.

“The way to look at anything Elon Musk does is through the lens of Mars,” Jim Cantrell, founder and CEO of Phantom Space, told Decrypt. “I know because I spent time with them in the early days before these issues arose—this is his entire life goal.”

Before founding the Tuscon-based aerospace company Phantom Space, Cantrell served as SpaceX’s first Vice President of Business Development.

“The Boring Company wasn’t just about building underground freeways—its real purpose was to bore into Martian hills for habitation, the most economical and efficient way to settle there,” Cantrell said. “The Cybertruck is fully pressurized because it’s designed for Mars, and it’s electric because solar energy is the only viable power source there.”

Cantrell did acknowledge that one million people in 20 years is ambitious but said SpaceX is up to the task.

“That’s what Starship is for, and SpaceX is close to making it work,” he said. “We’ve never built anything this big or ambitious; it’s fascinating to watch.”

To build excitement for the mission to Mars, SpaceX launched a March Madness promotion last week where the perfect bracket winner could win a trip to Mars on a SpaceX Starship.

Despite his optimism, skeptics argue that Musk’s vision of a “self-sustaining colony” on Mars is unrealistic, misleading, and a promotional stunt.

“The only way to achieve that is by going underground. Mars is uninhabitable due to extreme radiation,” journalist and podcast host Jim Stewartson wrote on X. “It’s a barren, frozen, and worthless rock, 140 million miles away. This is nothing more than a hoax to steal your money.”

But in his interview with Cruz, Musk claimed that Mars is a stepping stone to understanding the universe.

“I have a philosophy of curiosity. I want to understand the universe, which requires exploring other planets, star systems, and galaxies,” Musk said. “We may find alien civilizations or their remnants, gaining insight into where the universe is going, where it came from, and the questions we have yet to ask about the universe.”

SpaceX has faced several setbacks in its quest for Mars, including losing one of its Starship spacecraft over the Turks and Caicos in January due to an in-flight failure that the company called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”

Musk’s designs on Mars likely depend on his continued good relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump, who, during his inauguration speech in January, said going to Mars was part of America’s “manifest destiny.”

On Tuesday, Russian special envoy Kirill Dmitriev said the Kremlin wants to work with Musk to strengthen its space agency, Roscosmos, Reuters reported.

“I think that there will undoubtedly be a discussion with Musk in the near future,” Dmitriev reportedly said during a recent conference in Moscow.

Edited by Andrew Hayward

Editor’s note: Adds comments from Phantom Space CEO Jim Cantrell