Billionaire and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is still in the spotlight after delivering his speech in an astronautical convention in Mexico. This is because he expressed his intent to send one million human beings to Mars to start the first off-Earth community on the red planet.
Last Sept. 28, Musk revealed the outline for his Mars colonization plan in his speech entitled "Making Humans an Interplanetary Species." According to Musk, it is important to go beyond the comforts of the Earth and establish a sustainable habitation there. Musk stressed the importance of becoming interplanetary species.
"I think Earth will be a good place for a long time," Elon Musk said during the conference. "But the probable lifespan of human civilization will be much greater if we're a multiplanetary species," Musk added.
In order to do that, Musk, and his company Space is developing the Mars Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), a fleet of super rockets capable of carrying humans to Mars and beyond. The billionaire is confident that his commercial spaceflight company is capable of doing that. So the next step would be to decide how many people is he bringing to Mars. Musk initially said he plans to take one million people to the red planet.
"The thing that really matters is making a self-sustaining civilization on Mars as fast as possible," Musk said during the conference. "This is not about everyone moving to Mars. It's about being multi-planetary," Musk added.
But what Musk wanted is to open Mars not just for astronauts but for anyone willing and able to live on the red planet. To do this, Musk wanted to make the cost of the ticket to Mars cheaper so more people will have a chance to travel to there. Initially, a $10 billion price tag per person was estimated. But the SpaceX CEO think that they might be able to lower the price to $200,00 per head once the project is in full swing.
To get one million people to Mars, it will take about 20 to 50 interplanetary trips to the red planet using the SpaceX fleet of super rockets. Each rocket is capable of transporting 100 people and cargo with one trip every 26 months.
However, before the colonization of Mars begins there are a lot of technologies to be developed first like the sustainable habitation system. But SpaceX is working as fast as they can to execute Musk's dream of the human race becoming an interplanetary species.
SpaceX will send an unmanned crew to Mars as early as 2018 and the SpaceX CEO is confident that they will be able to send people to Mars by 2025.