For more than two decades, billionaire Elon Musk has focused on his lifelong goal of reaching Mars.
For more than two decades, billionaire Elon Musk has focused SpaceX, his rocket company, on the lifelong goal of reaching Mars. Over the past year, he has also stepped up preparations for what would happen if he did get there, according to the NYTimes.
Musk is directing SpaceX employees to delve into the design and details of a city on Mars, according to people familiar with the matter and documents seen by The New York Times.
One SpaceX team is planning small dome-shaped habitats, including materials that could be used to build them. Another is working on spacesuits to withstand the harsh Martian environment. A medical team is studying whether humans could have children on Mars. Musk has volunteered to donate his sperm to help “seed” the new colony, according to two of the people familiar with the matter.
The initiatives, still in their early stages, are shifts toward a more concrete plan for life on Mars as Mr Musk’s timeline accelerates.
While in 2016 Musk said it would take about 40 to 100 years to have a self-sustaining civilization on the planet, he told SpaceX employees in April that he now expects a million people to live there in about 20 years.
“There is a high urgency to create multiplanetary life,” Musk said in a public video of his remarks. “We have to do it while civilization is still viable.”
Musk has long attempted the impossible and often overcomes obstacles. But his vision of life on Mars takes his seemingly limitless ambitions to their most extreme.
No one has ever set foot on the planet. NASA doesn’t expect to send humans to Mars until the 2040s. And if humans do get there, they’ll be greeted by barren terrain, freezing temperatures, dust storms, and unbreathable air.
The SpaceX billionaire, however, is so fixated on the idea of creating a civilization on Mars that it has driven nearly every business endeavor he undertakes on Earth.
His vision for Mars is the foundation for most of the six companies he leads or owns, each of which has the potential to contribute to an off-Earth colony, according to documents and people familiar with the matter.
The Boring Company, a private tunneling venture founded by Mr. Musk, was created in part to prepare equipment to dig tunnels under the surface of Mars.
Musk has told people that he bought X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, in part to help him test how a citizen-led government ruled by consensus might work on Mars. He has also said that he envisions the planet’s inhabitants driving a version of the Cybertruck with a steel roof made by Tesla, his electric car company.
Musk, who is worth an estimated $270 billion, has publicly stated that he is only amassing wealth, including a Tesla investment portfolio worth about $47 billion, to fund his Mars plans.
“It's a way to get humanity to Mars, because building a self-sufficient city on Mars is going to require a lot of resources,” Musk said.
“You can’t just put a million people on Mars,” said Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who has known Elon Musk for 20 years and wrote the book “The Case for Mars.” He added that any colonization of the planet would take decades.
Mr Zubrin added that Mr Musk was distracted from his Mars ambitions because of his recent work on X. The tech billionaire has often faced criticism for his unequal allocation of resources across the companies he runs.
In 2018, SpaceX released two basic drawings of an alien colony. But Mr. Musk has largely kept those colonization plans under wraps because SpaceX, under its $2.9 billion contract with NASA, must first send a rocket to the moon.
To get to Mars, SpaceX has built Starship, a nearly 400-foot-long reusable rocket. Starship's immediate purpose is to take NASA astronauts to the moon, but it is also expected to become a "ship to Mars."
A planned version of the rocket could function as a small space station with living space at the nose, according to three people familiar with the rocket.
A rendering of the Starship interior, a version of which Mr. Musk posted on X, shows a violinist floating in zero gravity as she plays for a crowd.
Future versions of Starship are expected to carry 100 passengers at a time. Each trip would take about two years, Musk told the International Astronautical Congress in a 2016 presentation. NASA says a trip to Mars, about 140 million miles from Earth, would take about nine months.
By last year, the latest versions of Starship were being built at Starbase, a SpaceX facility in Boca Chica, Texas. In June, Starship successfully returned from its first test flight into space.
Plan to "colonize" Mars
Over the years, Mr. Musk has repeatedly revealed his thoughts on how humans will live on Mars.
A recurring theme is whether human life will continue on the planet. Scientists have yet to determine whether humans will be able to have children in space. Mr Musk has said that children will not be allowed on the first flights to Mars because of the dangers, although he hopes they will eventually live there.
In a 2013 interview, Mr. Musk said he hoped to create “our own species” on Mars. “I think it’s very likely that we would want to create new organisms that are better suited to life on Mars,” he said in the interview. “Humanity has done that over time, through selective breeding.”
In a 2022 podcast, Mr. Musk said he would address Mars’s frigid temperatures with a series of thermonuclear explosions that would warm the planet by creating an artificial sun. Hundreds of solar panels, likely built by Tesla, would heat homes and generate energy.
