Musk on Mars: between rocket and a hard place

WHEN Elon Musk takes the stage of the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Tuesday, it won’t be to rehash terrestrial concerns like a fatal Tesla autopilot crash or a poorly received merger proposal. The space and electric-car entrepreneur will be talking about realising his boyhood dream: going to Mars.

Musk’s keynote address, “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species”, will tackle the challenges and “potential architectures for colonising the Red Planet”, according to organisers. No one has been anticipating the event more eagerly than Musk, who founded Space Exploration Technologies, his rocket-launch company, 14 years ago with the goal of putting humans on other planets to live and work.

“I think it’s going to sound pretty crazy,” Musk said, referring to his Mars speech, at Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre last April where he was celebrating launching a rocket into space and then landing the 14storey-tall booster on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. SpaceX has gone on to repeat that feat three more times.

The Mars speech will be a welcome distraction for a man who’s been reeling of late. Tesla, which makes electric vehicles and energy-storage products, is blowing through cash as it races to build a huge battery factory in the Nevada desert and start selling its mass-market Model 3 next year. Tesla’s bid to acquire SolarCity, a debt-laden installer of rooftop solar panels, is embroiled in controversy and, adding to Musk’s headaches, SpaceX suffered a mystifying setback on September 1 when one of its rockets blew apart on the launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida, destroying an Israeli communications satellite.

Such Earth-bound woes aside, going to Mars is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Nasa has its own “Journey to Mars” programme, which calls for sending US astronauts there by 2030. And Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has said, if elected, one goal of her administration would be to “advance our ability to make human exploration of Mars a reality”.

Mars exploration got an enormous boost in August 2012, when Nasa’s Curiosity rover landed. The robotic vehicle continues to transmit breathtaking, high-resolution photographs of the dune- and hill-filled landscape, to the delight of scientists and Curiosity’s 3.4 million Twitter followers. Curiosity is exploring a crater that once held an ancient lake, proving Mars had a watery environment and, possibly, microbial life.

SpaceX plans to fly an unmanned spacecraft to Mars as early as 2018. The flights would continue about every two years and would culminate with the first human mission to Mars in 2025, Musk told the Washington Post in June.

“Mars is the closest planet that we can realistically settle,” said Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for Mars and founder of the Mars Society, where Musk once served on the board. “Musk doesn’t just want fame, or money. He wants eternal glory for doing great deeds.” — Bloomberg