After 10 Years, Netizens Remember Musk’s Promise To Put Man On Mars. Here’s What Fans Want To Know

Musk’s spacecraft engineering company, SpaceX, is also developing a prototype rocket capable of carrying crew and cargo to Mars and beyond.

New Delhi: In 2011, billionaire Elon Musk had made a promise that he would put a man on Mars in the next 10 years. The interview, in which Musk has vowed to take a man on Mars, resurfaced a decade later on Tuesday and netizens are interested to know what happened to that promise. Earlier, Musk had reiterated on many occasions that he wants to make humanity a “multi-planetary species” by establishing a colony on the Red planet. Musk’s spacecraft engineering company, SpaceX founded in 2002, is also developing a prototype rocket capable of carrying crew and cargo to Mars and beyond.

In an interview in April 2011 with the Wall Street Journal, Musk was insisted on giving a time line as to when humans could land on Mars. “Best case, 10 years. Worst case, 15 to 20 years,” Musk had responded back then.

A Twitter user has shared a screenshot of Musk's quote, which has now gone viral with over 37,000 likes and nearly 3,000 retweets.

The post went on to garner hundreds of comments. One of the users wrote, “To help him keep that promise, we should send him asap,” while another said, “He's doing pretty good so far.  Normal business predictions are usually a year or two off.”

“Hey @elonmusk, where are you on that Mars mission?” probed another user. “Covid slows things down. Lets give a liberal amount of 5 more years,” quipped another user.

SpaceX has made a lot of progress in building its Mars rocket, but not quite fast enough to meet the initial timeline. Earlier this year, Mr Musk revealed that he has pushed back his target date for reaching the Red planet. Taking to Twitter, he said that he now sees 2029 as the earliest date humans might first step on Mars.

Recently the 50-year-old SpaceX CEO spoke about his Mars mission where he tweeted addressing the former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and said that he was hopeful of getting people on Mars by 2029.

Even Pune-based techie Pranay Pathole probed Musk about how confident he was of completing the starship's first crew mission to Mars before 2013, to which the SpaceX CEO replied, “Still early stages on that. Getting Starship reliably to orbit, then achieving full & immediate reusability of both stages is by far top priority.”

Also, in case Musk's target date gets delayed into the 2030s, it will still be close to when the US space agency NASA is aiming to send first astronauts to Mars.