Investing in Space: All aboard the SpaceX Mars express

Chandan Khanna | Afp | Getty ImagesOverview: HEADLINEIt was a matter of time, with governments racing to clinch the first Mars laurels, that would start offering rides to the red planet.Italy's Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI) became the first client who's signed on to send scientific experiments aboard SpaceX's first commercial flights to Mars — where Elon Musk's space company has yet to land."Italy is going to Mars!" ASI President Teodoro Valente announced on social media, with Italian news outlet ANSA reporting the agency's payloads will feature a plant growth experiment, a weather surveillance station and a radiation sensor for data collection."#MadeinItaly on #Mars," Italian Industry Minister Adolfo Urso celebrated, while SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell declared open season for the company's Mars launch bookings."Get on board! We are going to Mars! SpaceX is now offering Starship services to the red planet," she said on the X social media platform.Notably, no timeline was given for the launch dates of these flights — with the odds of short-term travel to Mars increasingly under question.Both parties to the arrangement have been committed to Mars ventures.ASI barely just made headlines at the end of last month, when it inked a deal to develop the first human lunar outpost with Thales Alenia Space — building on the Italian space agency's 2020 partnership with NASA to coordinate bringing astronauts back to the Moon under the Artemis Accords

A longtime NASA contractor, the firm's also been offering satellite launch services to Eutelsat's OneWeb and AST SpaceMobile

And Musk has certainly been vocal his plans to pursue Mars colonization, once echoed by U.S

President Donald Trump's administration

SpaceX's reusable mammoth rocket Starship — the key to materializing Musk's Mars ambitions — has had a long-storied string of publicized test flight failures this year amid nical and refueling woes

We're to see during its next attempt later this month if it's overcome these challenges in the three months since its last explosive stint

That's skipping over a June incident when a Starship rocket exploded while being loaded with methane and liquid oxygen pellant ahead of its launch — due, Musk later said, citing preliminary data, to blems in the payload bay.Critically for our conversation, Starship is not yet rated crew-ready, and Musk himself has now pushed back his initial targets, flagging a "slight change" of a crewed flight during the next window in 2026, when Earth and the red planet are optimally aligned for travel to Mars."Slight chance of Starship flight to Mars crewed by Optimus in Nov/Dec next year

A lot needs to go right for that," he said last week on social media."More ly, first flight without humans in ~3.5 years, next flight ~5.5 years with humans

Mars city self-sustaining in 20 to 30 years."It may seem too early to start selling tickets to Mars, it's no secret that launch capacity worldwide has been struggling to keep up with demand for space access

Time will tell whether ASI's enthusiasm was ultimately strategic or premature

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