Expert rubbishes Elon Musk's claims his new reusable rocket will be able to send people to Mars

Gleaming against the blue sky, this is the rocket Elon Musk believes will fulfil his dream of taking astronauts to Mars.

The 164ft (50m) prototype – with its echoes of the 1930s sci-fi serial Flash Gordon – is intended to go into orbit within months.

The final frontier: A prototype of SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft seen at the company’s Texas launch facility in Boca Chica, Brownsville, Texas

Musk says that Starship may one day bring astronauts to Mars and may also make missions to the moon

Tesla founder Musk wants SpaceX’s reusable Starship to carry crew and cargo to the ‘Moon, Mars or anywhere else in the solar system’.

But yesterday a scientist poured cold water on the extravagant plans, saying the first manned trip to Mars would not happen for at least a decade and that Musk’s project was ‘a fantasy’.

David Whitehouse, a former BBC science correspondent, said: ‘Elon Musk talked about sending thousands of people to Mars in a few years… That’s not going to happen at all. When will we land on Mars? Not in the 2020s.’ He explained that – unlike trips to the Moon, which 12 people have now walked on – Mars is a ‘different kettle of fish’.

Tech entrepreneur Musk and his SpaceX team have proposed developing infrastructure on Mars and aim to get humans on the red planet by 2024.

Musk says Saturday marked the 11th anniversary of a SpaceX rocket reaching orbit for the first time

Birds fly overhead the huge silver rocket which is set to be launched by the end of the year 

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk updates the next-generation Starship spacecraft at Brownsville, Texas

A worker walks by the base of a prototype of SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft at the company’s Texas launch facility 

Flash in a pan: Rocket in TV series in 1936

But Mr Whitehouse told an audience at Henley Literary Festival: ‘The Moon is three days away and you can get back with no problem. Mars is at least nine months away… It’s probably a three-year round trip – so there is no coming back if there is a problem. It means you need a much better spacecraft, it means you have to have life cycles and recycling, because you can’t take all the food you need to go there.

‘You can’t take all the oxygen you need, you need to recycle it. Experiments show the degradation of the human body is worse than we thought, particularly mental impairment – and that’s after just a year in space. Also there’s radiation and that’s worse than we thought. And the expense.’ However, at the SpaceX launch pad in Texas on Saturday, Musk told a crowd: ‘We need to make space travel like air travel.’ He said the critical breakthrough would be making ‘a rapidly reusable orbital rocket’.

SpaceX currently flies two kinds of rocket – the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful rocket – for NASA, the US Air Force and private satellite firms. It is planned that Starship will eventually fly atop a new booster rocket, the Super Heavy.

SpaceX tweeted a picture of the rocket adding: ‘1 year ago today, we launched our first successful mission. To date, we’ve completed 78 launches and have developed the world’s only operational reusable orbital class rockets and spacecraft-capable of launching to space, returning to Earth, and flying again’