Billionaire Elon Musk has once again unveiled his ambitious plans to establish a human settlement on Mars shortly. The SpaceX CEO has been vocal about his views on establishing a colony on the Red Planet over the years. He constantly talks about achieving this goal with his companies, Tesla, SolarCity, the Boring Company, and Neuralink.
He dreams of moving people to Mars and making them a multi-planetary species. Mr Musk argues that something could happen on Earth that wipes out life and that the only way humanity can survive is to relocate to another planet and establish ourselves there.
To achieve this, he believes it is essential to start small and get the first people to Mars as soon as possible. He estimates that a trip to Mars costs about $10 billion per person, and he wants to bring this down to about $200,000, or the average price of a house in the United States.
One way he is trying to do this is by aiming to get his Starship rockets up and running and ready to fly people to Mars in about ten years. The Starship is a spacecraft designed to carry humans, animals, cargo, and other things into low-Earth orbit and then land them on Mars. The rocket is designed to be fully reusable, and the idea is that the spacecraft could return to Earth after each trip to Mars and take off again with fresh fuel.
Once on Mars, the plan is to build a city of around a million people who will set up a self-sustainable society there. This includes creating a renewable energy grid and building the necessary infrastructure to make the colony independent of Earth. It will also include establishing a factory to produce rocket fuel, which can then be used to travel to other destinations in the solar system.
Mr. Musk believes this will be enough to create a viable life on Mars and serve as a backup for the human race in case anything happens on Earth. He has also spoken of terraforming the planet, which involves using the same greenhouse gases that are responsible for climate change on our planet to turn Mars into a warmer, more livable place.
Some scientists have raised concerns about terraforming and whether the process will actually work. Others argue that it will just warm the surface of Mars and not transform the atmosphere to a point where it is habitable for humans. However, Mr Musk believes he can overcome these problems and is confident in his company’s ability to develop the technology required to relocate one million people to Mars. GeekWire Aerospace and Science Editor Alan Boyle joined us from the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara to discuss this ambitious plan.
