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Elon Musk reveals how he'll deposit one million people on Mars by 2050
Make no mistake about it, Elon Musk is in love with Mars. The visionary billionaire behind Tesla Motors and SpaceX has expounded endlessly about traveling to the Red Planet for years and colonizing its imposing landscape.
With a planned cargo mission to Mars still slated for sometime in 2022, and SpaceX's Starship and Superheavy hardware on track to fulfill Musk's notion of an Interplanetary Transportation System to allow humans to become a multi-planet species in the new decade, everything seems to be solidifying sooner than later. A new Starship prototype could launch before the end of March.
Now Musk has unveiled an even more ambitious goal on Twitter last Thursday, when he revealed lofty plans to construct a city of 1 million people on Mars by the year 2050. His wild idea is to build 1,000 of SpaceX's gleaming, 100-passenger reusable Starships over a 10-year period to deliver the necessary materials, equipment, food, water, and bodies to accomplish this seemingly impossible task.
The endgame would be to launch an average of three of his 387-foot-tall Starships per day from the aerospace firm's South Texas facilities and make the long voyage to Mars available to any person. He's even suggesting that loans would be available for anyone who can't afford it.
And as Musk enthusiastically reminds everyone, there will no doubt be a multitude of jobs available for ways to pay off your expensive one-way ticket.
While Earth and Mars only align for a rendezvous every 25 months or so, Musk's proposal is to load the Mars fleet aloft into Earth orbit, then wave goodbye to the swarm of 1,000 ships as they embark for the Red Planet over a 30-day launch window each two-year period.
What do you think of Musk's momentous colonization plan to build a multi-trillion-dollar Martian metropolis, and would you relocate off-planet to start a new life on Mars?
