Weeks after Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, announced a 270-foot, skyscraper-sized rocket, Elon Musk’s private space company had an announcement of its own. At the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Tuesday, the billionaire C.E.O. of SpaceX (and another little company you might have heard of, Tesla Motors) broke some dramatic news in a presentation called “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species”: SpaceX is moving ahead with plans to send the first humans to colonize Mars. And the first flights could begin leaving as soon as 2024 (although Musk, who has a penchant for setting ambitious goals and then falling short, called that estimate "optimistic.".)
A ticket to Mars won’t be cheap, but well within range for the new spacefaring 1 percent: about $200,000 a pop, with few guarantees. “It's not going to be a vacation jaunt,” as the billionaire said in a 2014 interview. “It’s going to be saving up all your money and selling all your stuff, like when people moved to the early American colonies.” On Tuesday, Musk suggested the first self-sustaining colony could be up and running as soon as the 2060s.
SpaceX’s interplanetary ship will take off from Earth using a booster rocket, carrying about 100 people at first, every 26 months, when the Earth is closest to Mars, Musk said. At first, these trips will take between 80 and 150 days, though eventually transport time could drop to 30 days. Rocket development will likely require a public-private partnership (the company has previously announced plans to work with NASA), which Musk has estimated will cost about $10 billion. “We’re trying to make as much progress as we can with the resources we have,” he said. The rocket, a beefed-up version of SpaceX’s existing Falcon 9 booster, will likely be named “Heart of Gold,” after the spacecraft in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
The initial goal of SpaceX’s Mars mission would be to establish a self-sufficient colony. Musk, who has been vocal about his desire to live and eventually die on Mars (“just not on impact,”), said that to pick the first colonizers, the qualifications for going would include a high risk tolerance for mortality: “Are you prepared to die? If that’s O.K., then you’re a candidate for going.” But Musk, who said he’ll also be funding the Mars mission with his own money, said he probably won’t be among the first to travel to Mars. “I’d definitely need to have a good succession plan because the probability of death is really high on the first mission,” he said. “And I’d like to see my kids grow up.” The missions will not be one-way trips, however; colonizers will be able to fly home if they want to, and SpaceX will want its spacecraft back for future trips anyway.
Musk did not address health concerns for the first candidates flying on SpaceX’s missions to Mars. “The radiation thing is often brought up, but it’s not too big of a deal,” he said in regard to passengers being exposed to solar radiation, which can cause cancer and cardiovascular disease. Indeed, Musk’s announcement seemed like more of a vision than a concrete plan, with few specifics about funding or operations. NASA’s own Journey to Mars initiative, which doesn’t have a plan beyond its stated goal of sending people to Mars by 2030, has faced criticism for not having an achievable strategy to get there. SpaceX, meanwhile, has accomplished other major milestones, most recently landing one of its Falcon 9 rockets on a launch pad in the middle of the ocean.
But Musk still faces more immediate, terrestrial problems before he can begin living in the future. Earlier this month, days before a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was scheduled to bring Facebook’s first satellite to orbit, the rocket exploded during a prelaunch test on a launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The explosion is still unexplained, with SpaceX announcing in the aftermath that the accident was caused by an “anomaly on the pad.” That’s an ominous sign for Musk’s first Martians. But interplanetary travel is never without a few risks.
