Elon Musk to Send People to Mars in 2024

Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk has mastered the landing of reusable space shuttles with his commercial space service company SpaceX. He has moved on from transporting goods to carrying people in space. Musk said he can bring people to Mars in as early as 2024.

SpaceX is scheduled to launch an unmanned mission to Mars in 2018, after that, the company expects to be able to land humans on the red planet nine years from now. To accomplish this feat, SpaceX is building the Flying Dragon version 2 rocket which will be capable of reaching any destination within the solar system. "It is intended to carry astronauts to the International Space Station," said Musk in an interview.

Flying Dragon version 2, according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, will be sent to Mars in 2018 and it is capable of transporting seven people at a time in an 18-month journey. But Musk is also quick to announce that their new rocket is still missing one very important feature, it is not capable of going back to Earth yet.

Musk, however, is confident that from their 2018 unmanned mission to Mars, the 2024 target to land humans on the red planet is likely to occur.

"If things go according to plan, we should be able to - we should be able to - launch people in 2024, with arrival in 2025," Musk said in a statement as published by CNN.

During the Mars timeline at the Code Conference, Musk also revealed that he has plans for the "colonization of Mars" although he did not reveal any details about it yet.

Article on @SpaceX and colonizing Mars by @waitbutwhy https://t.co/HhBJ48QSMW

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 17, 2015

Meanwhile, SpaceX is expected to complete another resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) this coming July.

Musk also expressed his intent to go off the Earth in the next coming years, because he hasn't been to space yet. And in an unsurprising plot, Musk was also quoted saying that although he doesn't have a Martian "death wish", to die on Mars is not a bad idea at all.