Everyone’s favorite entrepreneur Mr. Musk has made us all believe in the future and what it brings. His ideas and visions are what brings us joy for the time ahead and something to look forward. This time, he surprised us with the information that he is planning to colonize Mars and settle it in “our lifetime”!
Elon Musk is planning to send people to Mars, as some of you know, and he said that the ticket price will significantly drop from $200.000 to $100.000 per person, over the time. He also stated “We need to go from these early exploration missions to actually building a city”, at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. On that same Congress, a video about his future ambitions was shown to everybody there and was based on rockets that can be reused, propellant farm made on Mars, and a possibility of having 1000 spaceships in the Earth orbit each carrying up to a 100 people each.
Mr. Musk also said that their spacecraft isn’t going to be as everybody is expecting small and cramped and that the reality is that they will be “fun or exciting” with restaurants, zero gravity games, cabins pizzerias and what not. The SpaceX company founded in 2002 by this billionaire has already started working on the Musk’s vision of the Mars fleet, and they all believe that they can take people as far as Jupiter and beyond from there. To make this possible Musk stated that it would take a “huge public-private partnership” and NASA has already offered their technical expertise but no cash, unfortunately.
Musk also made clear that the first endeavors will be rather “dangerous” with a very high mortality for the first few trips but he also added that it would be an “incredible” adventure! “It would be basically, are you prepared to die? If that’s OK, then you’re a candidate for going!” according to him. SpaceX CEO is very optimistic in his statements and predictions where one says that the first manned mission to Mars might leave Earth by 2024 and touch the face of Mars the next year! A test if you like is planned by 2018 where the SpaceX will send unmanned cargo capsule to Mars so they can verify the accuracy of descent, entry and landing systems.
Experts are very skeptical about all of this stating that this is a project that will need massive engineering feats and a huge budget. They praised Musk’s enthusiasm but said that he is “long on vision, short on detail” and “inspiring”, but it would be “challenging to accomplish this in 10 years”. Furthermore, we have recently seen the big failure of one of the rockets. In only a few moments this expensive piece was transformed into a ball of fire.
