SpaceX aims to colonize Mars
Millionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk has unveiled a plan to colonize Mars and make humans a “multiplanetary species.”
The entrepreneur says he hopes to create a “selfsustaining city” on the Red Planet that would be populated using reusable rockets. He said a ticket would be less than $345,000 per person.
“If we can get the cost of moving to Mars to be the same price as a medianpriced house in the U. S. of about $ 250,000 ($ 330,000 Canadian), then I think the probability of establishing a civilization would be relatively high,” Musk said.
He unveiled the scheme to build an extraterrestrial settlement on Mars “in our lifetimes,” which he previously acknowledged was “going to sound pretty crazy,” at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico.
The gathering, which included Apollo- era astronaut Buzz Aldrin, drew men and women who have spent lifetimes studying the solar system, the galaxies beyond, and how to get there one day.
The Tesla boss has long held space ambitions and in 2002 he founded SpaceX. The project has come under scrutiny after a string of failures, including an explosion on liftoff that destroyed a Facebook satellite worth more than US$250 million.
Musk isn’t the only person with a plan to get to Mars. U.S. presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has said that one of her aims if elected will be “to advance our ability to make human exploration of Mars a reality.” Nasa also has a “Journey to Mars” program, which aims to send humans to the planet by the 2030s.
The SpaceX rocket revealed by Musk could transport 100 people at a time and would take 26 months to reach Mars. He admitted it would take more than 1,000 rockets to create the Martian city. In a four- minute animated video released before Musk’s speech, people walked into a spacecraft perched atop a rocket booster that lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
The f i rm has already begun testing the Falcon 9 booster, which would propel the methane- powered carbon- fibre rocket into orbit. The booster would then return to Earth and collect more fuel before replenishing the orbiting spaceship for its journey to Mars. “Refuelling in orbit is one of the essential elements,” Musk said.
He said SpaceX plans to have the first spaceship tested in suborbital flights by 2020. It will also send unmanned Dragon spaceships to Mars within two years.