Elon Musk Outlines Plans to Go to Mars
The ambitious project from the SpaceX founder.
Elon Musk has always aimed for Mars. The SpaceX and Tesla founder spoke to the International Astronautical Congress and showed off a video detailing exactly how he is planning to do it, saying “What you saw there is very close to what we’ll actually build,” referring to the rockets in the video. The estimated cost of developing rockets that can launch and travel to Mars would be approximately $10 billion USD, and Musk offered a timeline on how sending humans to Mars would be achievable in 10 years.
Each of the purported SpaceX rockets would take around 100 passengers every 26 months. Tickets per person may cost approximately $500,000 USD at first, and then drop to a third of that over time. In order to establish a self-sustaining civilization on the Red Planet, over 10,000 flights will have to successfully land for a population of 1 million — not including the many trips that are needed to transport equipment and supplies. On this timeline, there could be a self-sustainable Mars population in anywhere from 40 to 100 years. Check out the video above and let us know what you think about Musk’s ambitions.
