Elon Musk’s long-term ambition of colonizing Mars is an idea you’d normally find in science fiction novels rather than something actually on the cards for humanity today. Yet that’s what the tech entrepreneur is hoping we can achieve within his lifetime. As for the first humans on Mars? It’s likely to be much sooner – and even as soon as 2030.
“I think the first journeys to Mars are going to be really very dangerous. The risk of fatality will be high; there’s just no way around it… It would be, basically, ‘Are you prepared to die?’ If that’s OK, then, you know, you’re a candidate for going.”
Life on Mars
Musk bluntly outlined the possible risks that any manned mission to Mars will involve when speaking at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) a decade ago.
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His comments underlined the fact that the engineers and astronauts involved in the first flights will have to accept extreme risk – and serve as a means of psychological filtering for anybody considering a role in such a mission as and when it may happen in the future.
During his talk, Musk also launched a concept design for an Interplanetary Transport System spaceship, which is designed to carry between 100 and 200 settlers to Mars, with roughly 1,000 of these vessels leaving Earth in unison.
Ashes to Ashes
Despite Musk’s longstanding ambition for SpaceX to get people onto Mars, developments in recent months and years have stalled progress – especially a pivot from the company to focus on the Moon.
Musk formally delayed the Mars infrastructure timeline by up to seven years in February, citing the need to protect humanity’s future by building a “self-growing city” on the lunar surface. This is despite saying in January last year that “we’re going straight to Mars” while describing the Moon as “a distraction”.
Musk’s comments over the last few years about getting to Mars have come across as overly ambitious, putting it mildly. Critics suggest that SpaceX may never actually achieve this – including Britain’s chief astrophysicist Lord Martin Rees, who described the plans as “dangerous delusion“.
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