Still more ambitious is Musk’s goal to reach Mars within 20 years – ten if he can. He firmly believes that it will be as natural a step for life to become multi-planetary as it was for it to evolve from single-celled creatures, move out of the sea and develop consciousness.
Musk says he wants to put 10,000 people on Mars, perhaps many more, and believes that will become a business proposition if the cost of a ticket can be brought down to the price of a decent house in California. Musk believes he will need $2 billion to $5 billion to reach the Red Planet which he sees as readily achievable.
Unlike Congress, Elon is serious about human spaceflight. And settlement.
Personally, I’d like for them to focus on increasing their flight rate (assuming payloads are available) to shake out any bugs in their systems. It’s great to be a visionary but first things first. It like those people who want to focus on interstellar flight when we can’t even launch anyone into orbit (much less beyond) at the moment.
LEO -> Geo -> Lagrange -> Luna ->->->->->->->-> Mars.
Another visionary about space is Newt.
If you haven’t seen this yet, find out for yourself. The MSM and the Republican Establishment don’t want you to.
Find out for yourself. Think for yourself.
“NEWT’S TOWN HALL MEETING ON SPACE POLICY” http://conservatives4newt.blogspot.com/2012/01/video-newt-gingrich-town-hall-meeting.html – Cocoa, Florida – January 25, 2012 – 33:42
Elon’s serious about *talking about* Mars settlement, but SpaceX is — for the moment and near-future — a rocket/spacecraft company, not a closed-loop life-support system company. There are so many, many things that need to be discovered and engineered to enable Mars settlement, perhaps foremost among them being a desire among people not in the space community to actually want to settle on Mars.
Paragon Space Development *is* a closed-loop life support system, so why would anyone want SpaceX to be another? Granted, competition is good, but SpaceX is already far more vertically integrated than anyone (including Elon) is comfortable with, and by strange coincidence is contracting with Paragon to provide life-support capability. There are also experienced life-support people on staff at SpaceX, but I suspect more to interface with Paragon than to design hardware in-house.
This is the way it should be. New Space is not, can not be, and should not be one charismatic billionaire running his own private space program all the way up to cities on Mars for the rest of the space geeks to live in. Not that I think there will be any shortage of would-be settlers under any circumstances, but there will be far more people willing to settle in an actual community than in one rich guy’s private estate.
And as it turns out, a community is what we have. Elon Musk isn’t even the richest or most important member, just the most prominent at the moment.
Where is the hard evidence, though, that vast swathes of people – let alone people with families, or who want to start them – would be willing to give up life on Earth to live in a bubble on Mars? It is human nature for us to want a better, safer life for our children. I don’t see how living on Mars offers one.
Alex,
You don’t need vast swathes of folks to settle space. Both Australia and the New World were originally settled by groups of less then 100, perhaps as few as 50. Most of the Polynesian Islands likely had even smaller founding populations. Reproduction did the rest. A few hundred space settlers a year would be more then enough to build a viable Solar System wide economy fairly quickly.
The belief that space settlement would be like the American west, with millions emigrating, is another of the legacies of Dr. O’ Neill’s model of space settlement that has sent the field in the wrong direction. After the Civil War, when western migration was at its peak, emigration was never more then a small percent of the U.S. population. Even today the majority of folks, even in the U.S. don’t move that far from where they are born.
“Where is the hard evidence, though, that vast swathes of people – let alone people with families, or who want to start them – would be willing to give up life on Earth to live in a bubble on Mars?”
You could try asking them. Which has been done, repeatedly. Were you unaware of this, or do you have hard evidence that the ones who said “Hell yes!” were all lying?
He wants the cost to be about the same as a California home, but with California tanking economically I’ll bet Mars settlers from the golden state won’t even bother putting their homes on the market to pay for the trip. They’ll just pound a sign in the yard saying “G T M” (Gone to Mars).
Side note: Back in the 1800’s Kentuckians used to abandon their houses with a sign saying “G T T” (Gone to Texas), or so claims a Texas boot store commercial that airs in the Bluegrass.
George,
Yes, that was popular after the Panic of 1819, since Texas was part of Mexico so those going there could escape their debts.
http://mises.org/rothbard/panic1819.pdf
We are going to settle mars which means I was born 40 years too soon.
The galaxy regularly sterilizes stellar systems. You would think that would make people say hmmmm…
But human existence is obviously less important than personal existence. /sarc.
I hope Elon gets his retirement plan.