Casey Handmer is the founder of Terraform Industries, a company developing technology to produce low-cost natural gas from sunlight and air. In January, the company closed its latest $26 million funding round.

A former researcher at Caltech, Hyperloop, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Handmer has authored several influential books on Mars colonization and industrialization.

This piece was originally published on his blog.

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As of today, it is 592 days until October 17, 2026, when the mass-optimal launch window to Mars opens next.

While I don’t have any privileged information, it’s fun to speculate about what SpaceX could choose to send on its first Starship flights to Mars. (Spoiler alert: Rods from the gods…)

Over the next 600 days, SpaceX has a number of key technologies to demonstrate: orbit, reuse, refill, and chill.

• Orbit. Yesterday, the company pushed back the scheduled launch of Flight 8, which had the potential of finally achieving orbit. Earlier flights technically had the necessary performance but deliberately targeted the ocean to prevent the possibility of a Starship being stranded in orbit without propulsion capability, and then undergoing an uncontrolled re-entry.

• Reuse. The holy grail of rocketry. SpaceX has indicated it may attempt to refly Booster 14 on Flight 9, which would establish booster reuse. Flight 9 may also see the first attempt to catch the Starship upper stage, but in any case the successful reuse of both stages of Starship is necessary to fly to Mars.

• Refill. We can load Starship up with cargo for Mars but it’s not going to leave low Earth orbit (LEO) unless it can be refilled with fresh fuel and oxidizer. SpaceX has been working on orbital refilling for some time, but we need to see it actually working.

• Chill. By far the easiest of the four tasks, but long-term stability of Starship’s cryogenic fuel will require that it be actively refrigerated, particularly in the challenging thermal environment of LEO or deep space.

It’s hard to make predictions, but I’m optimistic that SpaceX will have multiple fully-fueled Starships ready to go in October next year, followed by a ten-month cruise and then either a Mars orbital insertion or attempted landing. While I’m optimistic about Earth departure, Starship’s first ever attempted Mars landing falls into the “excitement guaranteed” bucket, and perhaps we shouldn’t pin all our hopes on success the first time.

This poses an interesting question about what, if anything, we should ship to Mars at the first opportunity.

In my recent article for Palladium, I summarized 11 key technologies required to build a base on Mars. Some of them would be essential from the very beginning, while others only later on. Some are areas where SpaceX already has world-leading expertise, and others are areas of active research requiring considerable additional engineering effort.

As of 2025, industry expertise looks like this: The bolded items are key areas SpaceX will need to bring in-house to assure success on its timelines, while the italic options may also be useful. 

In particular, it seems clear that not much can be done at scale on Mars without a synthetic fuel plant (which is part of the reason I’m working on this technology at Terraform Industries).

Synthetic fuel is easy enough on Earth, but on Mars it depends on several non-trivial inputs: electricity, ambient CO2, and water to source hydrogen.

CO2 ingestion is easy enough; it was demonstrated by the MOXIE instrument on the Mars Perseverance rover.

Mars’ power will most likely come from large solar arrays on the surface. This is a challenge in terms of mass, since providing enough solar arrays will require multiple Starships of cargo. But Starship exists to schlep mass from Earth to Mars, so I think this will be doable.

Water is the tough one. We know that Mars has plenty of water. We can even see glacial features and splosh craters in satellite photos of prospective landing sites. But there’s a big difference between turning on a tap and obtaining sufficient water from ice. How deep is the ice? How pure is it? Is it full of rocks, sand, gravel, and salt? Is it porous or solid? How cold and hard is it? How much do we need? How far from our landing site are sufficient water deposits? How deep might geothermally-heated liquid water be?

We just don’t know the answers to these questions, and it’s not for lack of trying! We know there is water, but the error bars around its composition are large, and that makes engineering a water mining machine really difficult. It’s not impossible, but if we knew just a little bit more about the water situation, we could save a bunch of mass, power, reliability, and engineering effort.

So in addition to testing long duration cruise, systems stability and reliability, and Mars entry, descent and landing, it would be very useful to add instruments to Starship that can shrink the error bars around water for our prospective landing site(s).

Remote water prospector ideas

Starship’s great potential to transport enormous quantities of mass to Mars (and other places) means we should already be developing next generation scientific instruments. Some may not be ready by October 2026, but there’s another opportunity in 2028. Early Starships may not succeed, but that’s not a problem if we produce enough instruments to cover for potential losses. This has been obvious enough since 2019, and in an ideal world we’d already have a warehouse full, ready to go.

Ultraspectral orbital imager

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) flies the HiRISE instrument, a 0.5 m aperture scanning camera with a resolution of 0.3 m per pixel, imaging in three color bands. The whole instrument weighs just 65 kg. 

What could we ship on Starship with a 600 day lead time? JPL has developed some incredible ultra-spectral scanning cameras with around 6000 color channels. Hook this to a 2.5 m aperture camera mounted in a Starship that aerobrakes into orbit, and we can get precise surface mineralogy at 6 cm resolution. The limitation of this approach is that much of Mars is covered in a thin but optically opaque layer of dust with relatively uniform mineralogical constituents. Still, it’s time to move beyond HiRISE!

Orbital radar

MRO also flies SHARAD, a ground penetrating radar that has helped us map and understand Mars’ ice covering, particularly where it’s obscured by a layer of surface moraine. SHARAD has collected extraordinary data for an orbital radar with a power of just 10 W! What if we used Starship to transport a dozen Starlink satellites to Mars, each with a software update to use their powerful phased array antenna as an orbital radar? Because they form a constellation, they could even do multistatic synthetic aperture statistics. We need to build a relay constellation in Mars’ orbit sooner or later. As a complementary component, we could drop a wideband radio into the orbital Starship to put out far more than 10 W at much lower frequencies, seeing deeper into the crust. We have extremely powerful, versatile, and programmable digital radio front-ends these days, and we should be using them to find stuff underground, including more scrolls!

Here’s an example of existing orbital datasets for the prospective landing site in the Phlegra Montes. There’s no shortage of ice, but can we easily get it into our distribution system?

Thermal imager

Mars Odyssey flew a thermal imager (THEMIS) to Mars in 2001. Part of its mission was to search for evidence of volcanism or geothermal hydrological activity (such as geysers). While THEMIS collected a global dataset for both night and day conditions, as far as I know, neither detections or exclusions of active geological surface heat nor the results of a global survey have ever been published. We could send a far more capable thermal imager to perform a global survey in the appropriate orbit to find any trace of excess surface heat.

Non-remote water prospector ideas

Starship is designed to move 100 tonnes of cargo to Mars, so we’re not limited to larger versions of existing orbital instruments. Let’s explore options for soft-landed (or not-so-soft landed!) surface mass.

Surface prospector

A lander, rover, or helicopter could perform direct inspections of surface conditions within a limited area adjacent to landing. For example, a Starship on the surface could literally deploy a drill and see what happens. Honeybee Robotics has developed numerous varieties of water-extracting drills. Why not YOLO a few of these and see what happens? 

Early Starship landing attempts should focus on producing numerous, relatively simple robust robots to a) hedge against potential losses by focusing on production and b) test new materials, processes, and methods that can be fed back into scaled up systems for subsequent exploration.

Rods from the gods

We know there’s a high likelihood mostly pure water-ice exists within 10 to 20 m of the surface across many prospective landing sites. Why not drop off a few dozen long steel (or tungsten) spears, guide them in while tracking them on radar, and then survey their impact craters with HiRISE as soon as the dust clears? These rods will impact the surface at about 8 km/s, penetrating many times their length and exposing the subsurface to our existing orbital instruments for the first time. The main attraction of this approach is that it requires essentially zero additional effort on top of the existing program, whereas the others require either a crash instrument development program, or building and flying multiple intricate surface operations robots and landing them with an extremely untested EDL system. Rods from the gods merely require dropping a few tonnes of steel in roughly the same area and then surveying the damage. It’s also the only method that can deliver enough energy to directly access the deep subsurface at scale.

There’s even precedent for dropping chunks of tungsten on Mars. NASA JPL’s rover missions each used eight large tungsten masses totaling 300 kg to alter the aerodynamic characteristics of its aeroshell on entry, and their impacts were found with MRO after the fact.

Summary of options

In my opinion, the greatest source of uncertainty for the near-term success of a Mars base, beyond Starship transport capability, is sourcing sufficient water. Any kind of industrial activity on Mars will consume water in the thousands, if not millions of tonnes. We don’t want to be constrained by raw material availability, so we have to find some way to produce a torrent of water.

There are a number of ways to address this uncertainty. In terms of cost and risk, the cheapest, easiest, and least risky option is rods from the gods – and it’s also pretty fun. If we’re prepared to spend more money and allocate more engineering effort with a modest increase in risk, we can deploy numerous instruments and additional satellites into Mars’ orbit.

At the same time, a cost/risk optimal strategy should also allocate a modest portion of the pie to developing soft-landed surface instruments and robots to perform contact science and directly scout prospective landing locations.

Tech outlook 2028

The next launch window is in November 2028. Starships from the previous launch will land in August 2027, leaving us, at most, about 500 days to process data and assimilate results from prospecting and other tech demos on the earlier flight. This cadence will set the pattern for the next few decades of development: Proactive development and stockpiling of projected necessities, followed by reactive short-term design and cargo revisions in preparation for consecutive launch windows separated by only 26 months.

If all goes well, the technology situation in 2028 could look like this:

SpaceX will have in-housed all the technology critical to the successful operation of the Starship fleet, including long-duration life support. It will have also taken the lead on buying down risk on key environmental parameters, which are mostly landing site water and mineral abundance.

For collaborative parties, that leaves the relatively easy task of pressure structures, and the harder task of developing a fuel plant, rock miners, construction robots, and any nuclear reactors. Now is the time to start work on this essential hardware!

Once these pieces are all in place, the Mars city will have secure access to import shipping capacity and all raw material inputs, as well as a large pressurized and climate-controlled volume in which to build. This “terrarium” allows the rest of the industrial stack to be imported from Earth with minimal redesign or customization, limited only by shipping capacity.

The next question

What do we bring when we send people? What do we need to start working on today to ensure it is ready in time? Once we have the Mars city pressure structure and stockpiles of water, various gasses, and mineral ores in place, what needs to be sent up, how much of it, and when?

—Casey Handmer