SpaceX chief Elon Musk to unveil plan for colony on Mars

SpaceX chief Elon Musk was set to unveil his ambitious plan to build a human colony on Mars on Tuesday after sending a manned spacecraft to the Red Planet within a decade.

He will lay out his vision during a presentation titled “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species” at the International Astronautical Congress in the western Mexican city of Guadalajara.

Although the South Africa- born Canadian-American entrepreneur has given few details about his plan, he promised in a Washington Post interview in June that it will be “mind blowing.”

He will discuss the “longterm technical challenges that need to be solved to support the creation of a permanent, self- sustaining human presence on Mars,” the conference’s program says. SpaceX plans to send an unmanned Dragon cargo capsule to Mars as early as 2018, paving the way for a human mission that would leave Earth in 2024 and arrive on the Red Planet the following year.

However, experts are skeptical of the feasibility.

Reaching Mars — 225 million kilometres ( 140 million miles) from Earth on average — and living there would require major feats of engineering and a massive budget.

“It’s unlikely that ( Musk) will be able to get humans on Mars by 2025,” John Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said, noting that Musk has wrongly forecast the launch of SpaceX rockets in the past.

SpaceX would have to team up with a state space agency to afford such a mission, he said. “Bottom line is the cost. You’re talking of tens of billions of dollars and SpaceX doesn’t have that type of money.”

However, while Musk’s timeline is ambitious, “it’s exciting to have someone with the vision” and “we are all interested to see what he has in mind and whether he can make a compelling case,” Logsdon added.

The US space agency Nasa has announced its own plans to send people to Mars by the 2030s.

A research village could be built on the Moon to serve as a “stepping stone” to a Mars mission, European Space Agency chief Jan Woerner said at a news conference on Monday.

It’s unlikely that ( Musk) will be able to get humans on Mars by 2025. Bottom line is the cost. You’re talking of tens of billions of dollars. — John Logsdon, Former director of Space Policy Institute