New Delhi:Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, who has been open about his aspirations to develop a human colony on Mars, has stressed in a series of tweets the need to improve technology to overcome financial barriers to making the dream a reality.
Musk’s tweet was a response to a post by Bill Ackman, who was promoting an ad titled “Make America Healthy Again” posted by Robert F. Kennedy’s former running mate Nicole Shanahan.
The billionaire CEO claimed that it currently takes $1 billion to send a tonne of cargo to Mars. This exorbitant figure highlights the immense financial hurdles that exist to making interplanetary travel a reality.
As for X, Musk tweeted: “Achieving multi-planetary life is fundamentally a cost per ton of payload problem on Mars. It currently costs about $1 billion per ton of payload on the surface of Mars. That cost needs to be improved to $100,000 per ton to build a self-sustaining city there, so the technology needs to be 10,000x better. Extremely difficult, but not impossible.”
‘Self-sustaining city on Mars’
Hoping to build a self-sustaining city on Mars, the tech mogul said the cost of transporting payloads to the surface of the red planet must be cheap to realize the historic vision that could further revolutionize the understanding of outer space.
“SpaceX created the first fully reusable rocket stage and, much more importantly, made reusability economically viable,” he added.
Chronology of the trip to Mars
Announcing his plan to make Mars a reality, Musk added that the first Starship Super Heavy mission will launch in 2026 “when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens.”
According to Musk, these unmanned flights will test the reliability of landing on Mars. If the landings are successful, the first manned flights to Mars will be launched in 2028.
In his tweets, Musk said he plans to exponentially increase the frequency of flights so that a self-sustaining city could be built on Mars within 20 years. He believes that being multi-planetary will greatly increase the likely lifespan of consciousness.
“The first spacecraft to Mars will launch in two years, when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens. They will be uncrewed, to test the reliability of an intact landing on Mars. If those landings go well, the first crewed flights to Mars will follow in four years. The flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about twenty years. Being multi-planetary will vastly increase the likely lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer literally and metabolically have all our eggs on one planet,” she wrote in another tweet.
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