Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX, is out there spearheading the most ambitious project the planet has ever seen- the colonization of Mars (that’s like saying making a fiction movie (“The Martian”) true..15 years within its release..). One of my fellow blogger wrote about the trade-off between the possibility of having a mars mission and the unpredictability of its success, and hence being sceptical about the viability of investing
billions of dollars into this project. But are we ready to see the future? Is Elon Musk looking at a new galaxy of opportunities or an old planet of losses?
Very recently, billionaire founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk unveiled his “ambitious” plan to colonize mars. He plans to send about a million people into mars in the next 100 years.. yes this does sound a little bit more than “ambitious”, but it could very well be the holiday destination we’ve always wished for! So though Musk admits to be “not always accurate” with his future plans, this does seem to be a jump too long to land.
But to pull this off, where would the billions of dollars come from? Well, Elon Musk believes that such kind of money could be realistically acquired from NASA, governments as well as the private sector. And though my fellow blogger seems to believe that it’s an investment too huge with no guaranteed returns, what’s the actual deal? In reality, SpaceX has invested barely 5% of its resources into the Inter-Planetary system program. The largest funded space program till date is the NASA Space Shuttle Program, with a total cost of approximately $196 billion..in the years 2011.. so counting for inflation, I believe funds from different sources would be sufficient for this venture! In fact, even universities with large budgets would die to have their name on such a mission to make to be able to offer such a field of study!
A global response to the technological breakthroughs of SpaceX, like the raptor engines, their Retrosonic Retropropulsion, etc has been positive and hopeful of such a mission. A mars colony would be the coolest exploration in the world for astrophysics with opportunities to explore new possibilities of survival on the planet! Mars is the only planet in the solar system after earth which would be able to be self-sufficient with water, air and fuel being present in its atmosphere.
One major concern though is risk of death for the first group of explorers as Mr Musk has said: “I would definitely need to have a very good succession plan, because the probability of death is quite high on the first mission”.
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Reference blog: https://blogs.ubc.ca/luccasiau/
Sources: http://upstart.bizjournals.com/entrepreneurs/hot-shots/2016/10/26/spacex-ceo-elon-musk-dishes-about-mission-to-mars.html
http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/05/technology/boeing-mars-spacex-elon-musk/
http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/716624/SpaceX-Elon-Musk-Mars-colonists-DIE
