Elon Musk is a busy guy.
While his purchase of Twitter, now rebranded X, and his gradual embrace of electoral politics have grabbed most of the headlines, his ventures into telecom (StarLink), EV manufacturing (Tesla), infrastructure (The Boring Company) and aerospace (SpaceX) continue to expand and innovate. One might think that revolutionizing five separate industries simultaneously would be sufficient to keep his mind occupied, but Musk hasn’t taken his eyes off his greatest dream – making homo sapiens a multiplanetary species, with Mars as the first stop.
Recently, Musk took to X (of course) to announce his broad outline to create a self-sustaining city on Mars.
“The first Starships [SpaceX’s most advanced reusable rockets] to Mars will launch in 2 years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens. These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years.”
“Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years. Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet.”
Musk anticipates that once the initial phases are complete and the technical feasibility of manned flight to Mars is established, the economics of such travel will improve sufficiently to rapidly expand the number of flights.
“SpaceX created the first fully reusable rocket stage and, much more importantly, made the reuse economically viable.
“Making life multiplanetary is fundamentally a cost per ton to Mars problem. It currently costs about a billion dollars per ton of useful payload to the surface of Mars. That needs to be improved to $100k/ton to build a self-sustaining city there, so the technology needs to be 10,000 times better. Extremely difficult, but not impossible.”
In an age of pessimism and distrust in the future, it seems that Musk is determined to pull us out of our funk and to once again dream big – to literally reach for the stars.
