On May 29th at Starbase, Texas SpaceX CEO and lead designer Elon Musk provided an update of SpaceX's Starship Mars architecture "The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary". Here are slides from his presentation.
Full presentation:
Slides from the presentation
Starship mission timeline for next 4 Earth-Mars transfer windows every 26 months:
The next opportunity is in the end of 2026, with landing in 2027:
Moons of Madness is a first-person cosmic horror adventure game released in 2019. Set in a near-futuristic Martian research outpost, the game blends hard science fiction with Lovecraftian horror, drawing inspiration from works like The Martian and H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos. The narrative follows Shane Newehart, an engineer tasked with maintaining the outpost until a relief team arrives on the transport ship Cyrano. The game’s depiction of the Martian outpost and its pervasive atmosphere of loneliness and abandonment are central to its immersive, unsettling experience.
The Martian outpost, Trailblazer Alpha, is a meticulously designed, state-of-the-art research facility built by the Orochi corporation to investigate a mysterious signal of intelligent origin detected from Mars. The outpost is a believable blend of scientific realism and eerie desolation, featuring functional areas like a greenhouse, infirmary, research labs, and solar panel arrays, all inspired by real-world Mars mission planning. The environment is detailed with personal touches – photo frames, workstations, coffee machines, and sticky notes – that evoke a sense of lived-in habitation, contrasting sharply with the growing sense of decay and neglect. As Shane navigates the base, he encounters malfunctioning systems, such as a flooded greenhouse filled with strange mist, Martian dust leaking into the infirmary, and alien-like, tentacle-covered vines sprawling across corridors, hinting at an otherworldly presence. The stark, rust-colored Martian landscape outside, with its dust clouds and desolate vistas, amplifies the outpost’s isolation, while the interior’s claustrophobic corridors and flickering lights enhance the feeling of being trapped in a failing, abandoned structure.
Shane, with limited security clearance, is unaware of the outpost’s true purpose and isolated from the broader mission, fostering a sense of disconnection from his colleagues and the world. His team’s absence – unexplained as they fail to return from an EVA mission – deepens this solitude, leaving him to face the outpost’s breakdowns alone. The narrative introduces psychological horror through Shane’s hallucinations and visions, possibly tied to his mother’s mysterious disappearance and his own fragile mental state, blurring the line between reality and madness. Cryptic messages, such as “They Never Turn Away!” scrawled on bulletin boards, and encounters with eerie entities like the “Thing in the Mist” intensify the feeling of being watched yet utterly alone. The outpost’s gradual transformation, with alien growths overtaking its once-functional spaces, mirrors Shane’s descent into isolation, as the environment itself seems to reject human presence.
The game’s pacing reinforces these themes, starting with routine tasks like aligning solar panels or repairing rovers, which ground players in Shane’s solitary duties, before escalating into survival against supernatural threats. The lack of combat mechanics heightens vulnerability, forcing players to confront the outpost’s dangers with only their wits, further emphasizing helplessness. While the story’s later plot twists – such as the revelation of Martian technology stabilizing the moons Phobos and Deimos as dormant elder gods – can feel disjointed, the atmosphere of loneliness and abandonment remains consistent, making Trailblazer Alpha a haunting stage for Shane’s unraveling psyche.
Here is a collection of images from the game, focusing on depiction of the Martian base:
Visualization of a concept for terraforming the arid, inhospitable and rust-colored expanses of Mars into habitable regions through a vast network of engineered hydrospheres. The concept envisions carving vast artificial lakes into the planet’s craters and basins, filling them with water sourced from subsurface ice and channeled through a network of canals (after increasing air pressure and temperature on Mars in the prior terraformation stage, allowing water to flow on the planet's surface). These lakes, featuring engineered habitats on artificial islands, would be interconnected to form a sprawling waterway system across the Martian terrain. By introducing liquid water to the surface and gradually transforming the barren landscape into a more habitable environment, this vision seeks to foster the development of self-sustaining colonies on these island habitats, laying the foundation for humanity’s long-term presence on the Red Planet.
The image was originally created in 2010 by Japanese illustrator Tetsuya Mizuno (Watermark) for the futuristic Desert Aqua-Net Plan by Japanese construction firm Shimizu Corporation.
On May 29th at Starbase, Texas SpaceX CEO and lead designer Elon Musk provided an update of SpaceX's 
