SpaceX, a privately funded aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, harbors rockets sitting in Launch Complex 39 at the Kennedy Space Center. (Photo : NASA via Getty Images)
Space X's Founder Elon Musk has announced his highly ambitious vision of colonizing Mars, which will begin as early as 2022. The project, if successful, will see over a million humans living on The Red Planet by 2060.
Musk was addressing an audience at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Tuesday, when he said that his vision was to achieve the goal of humans living on Mars. According to The Guardian, the question of how such extravagantly large expensive missions will be funded remains a mystery.
According to Musk's line of reasoning, there are "two fundamental paths" that currently face humanity. The first one is staying on Earth forever and waiting for an extinction event, while the second one is becoming a multi-planetary species that embraces civilization.
To achieve such a large-scale goal, Musk asserted that a multi-stage launch and transport system, which includes a reusable booster, would be the ideal vehicle. SpaceX has already built one - the Falcon 9 - and even gone past the post-testing stages.
Together with the booster, the interplanetary module would measure as long as two Boeing 747 aircraft. Musk presumes that the first of such space crafts would transport about 100 passengers to Mars.
The first ship to go to go to the red planet would be named Heart of Gold in honor of the ship powered by an "infinite improbability drive" found in Douglas Adams' work of fiction "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Another system on Mars could then be used to synthesize fuel from water and carbon dioxide for return trips.
Similar modules, which would launch through reusable booster systems, would hang about in Earth's orbit to refuel the interplanetary crafts. This would enable the crafts to make multiple trips to not only Mars but multiple parts of the solar system like Saturn's moon Enceladus.
According to CNN, since Earth and Mars are only in line every 26 months, it would take around 40 to 100 years to make enough trips to create a sustainable Mars colony. Musk is known for his excessive optimism in terms of deadlines, but he hopes that colonizing Mars will happen if enough effort is added to the idea.
Musk says the first unmanned trip to Mars will happen before 2018. Below is Musk discussing the long-term technical challenges that need to be solved to support the creation of a permanent, self-sustaining human presence on Mars:
