SpaceX Mars spaceships will ready by next year, optimistic Musk says

Mars spaceships will be ready for short flights by the first half of next year, predicts Elon Musk. The SpaceX and Tesla CEO was taking questions during an onstage appearance at the SXSW conference in Austin.

Musk did fudge Sunday on this prediction a little bit by conceding that his timelines can be optimistic.

It was only last month that SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy rocket with a payload that included Musk’s cherry-red Tesla convertible.

“In the short-term, Mars is really about getting the spaceship built,” an effort that has begun, Musk says. That will prove to other companies and countries that it can be done, providing the impetus for them to go and do it themselves.

“They currently don’t think it’s possible, so if we show them that it is, they’ll up their game and build interplanetary transport vehicles, as well,” he says.

From there, Musk says, “a tremendous amount of entrepreneurial resources

(will be) needed. because you have to build out the entire base of industry, everything that allows human civilization to exist.” That will be hard in places like Mars or the moon, he says, pointing out that such celestial outposts will not become an “escape hatch for rich people” but rather require those with a frontier mentality. “For the early people that go to Mars, it will be far more dangerous. It kind of reads like (Ernest) Shackleton’s ad for Antarctic explorers: Difficult, dangerous, good chance you’ll die. Excitement for those who survive.”

Musk says he doesn’t rank business or financial opportunities so much as see “things that don’t seem to be working that are important for our life and for the future to be good.

“If you were to do a risk-adjusted rate of return estimate on various industry opportunities, I would put building rockets and cars pretty much at the bottom of the list. They would have to be the dumbest things to do.”

“In the case of SpaceX, I just kept wondering why we were not making progress toward sending people to Mars. Why we didn’t have a base on the moon? Where are the space hotels that were promised in (2001: A Space Odyssey) the movie? It just wasn’t happening. Year after year, it was getting me down. ... The genesis of SpaceX was not to create a company but really how do we get NASA’s budget to be bigger.”

Meanwhile, in the history of the auto industry the only two companies that never have gone bankrupt or were failing and got acquired are Ford and Tesla,

Musk says.

“We almost did die at SpaceX,” he recalls. Musk said he had about $180 million from PayPal and thought he could allocate half of that sum to SpaceX, Tesla and another of his companies, SolarCity. He eventually realized that he had to put pretty much all of his money in “or the companies are going to die.”