The fantasy of humans living on Mars is a step closer to reality after Elon Musk, the founder-CEO of Hawthorne-based SpaceX, put his space-travel vision on paper this month.
Musk’s article in a journal called New Space has a fittingly lofty title: “Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species.” But it has an appropriately down-to-Earth goal: Musk begins by saying he’s writing “to make Mars seem possible — make it see it is something that we can do in our lifetimes. There really is a way that anyone can go if they wanted to.”
What follows is 16 pages, mostly understandable for the layman, of plans and illustrations that are both inspiring and practical-looking.
Perhaps this exhortation to put heart and mind behind further exploration of outer space is just what Americans need at a time when public life is dominated by self-interest, narrow-mindedness and insularity.
Or maybe it’s just a good investment opportunity and a hedge against whatever disaster could someday — as Musk thinks might happen — leave Earth uninhabitable.
Musk, whose SpaceX is the world’s largest private producer of rocket engines, says it’s possible to colonize Mars with as many as 1 million men and women over the next 50 to 100 years. The key is affordability; he thinks the per-person cost of a Mars trip can be shrunk from an estimated $10 billion using conventional ways of space travel to $200,000 or less. The key to such cost-cutting is having reusable, refuelable rockets, and hundreds of spaceships that could live in Earth orbit before beginning 80-day flights to Mars when the planets align properly every 26 months.
Musk, a South Africa native and Bel Air resident who founded Tesla and SolarCity, is estimated to be worth $15 billion. But even he can’t personally fund sustained travel to Mars and a human base there. Ultimately, Musk wants to encourage investment by other billionaires, and perhaps a public-private partnership.
That’s why making the plans public and plausible is a step in the right direction.
But judge for yourself. Musk’s article can be read for free (at least for now) at http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/space.2017.29009.emu
