SpaceX signs deal to fly Italian experiments to Mars on Starship's 1st commercial Red Planet flights

SpaceX now has a customer for some of its first Mars missions.

Teodoro Valente, president of the Italian Space Agency (known by its Italian acronym ASI), announced today (Aug. 7) that the organization has signed a deal to fly experiments on the first commercial Mars flights of SpaceX's giant new Starship rocket.

"The payloads will include, among other things, a plant growth experiment, a meteorological monitoring station and a radiation sensor," ASI officials said in a statement today (in English; translation by Google). "The goal is to collect scientific data during the approximately six-month interplanetary flight phase that Starship will undertake from Earth to Mars and subsequently to the Martian surface."

SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell celebrated the deal as well.

"Get on board! We are going to Mars! SpaceX is now offering Starship services to the Red Planet. We're excited to work with the Italian Space Agency on this first-of-its-kind agreement. More to come," she wrote in an X post today.

SpaceX is developing Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built — with Mars specifically in mind. Company founder and CEO Elon Musk thinks the fully reusable vehicle is the breakthrough needed to make human settlement of the Red Planet feasible at long last.

But there's a lot of work to do before Starship is ready for its first Red Planet trip; after all, the huge, two-stage vehicle has not even reached Earth orbit yet.

Starship launched for the first time in April 2023 and has conducted eight more suborbital test flights since, all of them from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas. During the three most recent liftoffs — which occurred in January, March and May of this year — SpaceX lost the vehicle's upper stage before it could make its planned splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX is currently gearing up for Flight 10 of Starship; that mission should launch sometime this month, Musk has said.