SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk provided some details regarding plans to send his company’s Dragon capsule to Mars as early as 2018, telling reporters last week that he wants to establish “cargo routes” similar to those used by the explorers of old.
According to AFP and Washington Post reports, Musk compared the journey to Mars to those long, arduous journeys traveled by the likes of de Gama and Magellan in centuries past, noting that the voyage to the Red Planet would undoubtedly be “hard, risky, dangerous, and difficult.”
That said, Musk added that he was confident that people would be eager to sign up because “as with the establishment of the English colonies, there are people who love that. They want to be the pioneers.” Before that becomes possible, however, he said that the first step will be to set up a supply chain so that those individuals will always have enough food and equipment.
“Essentially what we’re saying is we’re establishing a cargo route to Mars,” he told the Post last Friday. “It’s a regular cargo route. You can count on it. It’s going to happen every 26 months.”
“Like a train leaving the station. And if scientists around the world know that they can count on that, and it’s going to be inexpensive, relatively speaking compared to anything in the past, then they will plan accordingly and come up with a lot of great experiments,” Musk added.
‘Mind-blowing’ Mars colony project details coming in September
Musk announced his desire to sent the unmanned Dragon capsule to Mars within the next two years or so on Twitter a few months ago, and is in the midst of a privately-funded program that hopes to send experiments and people to the Red Planet by the early 2020s. While NASA is not funding SpaceX’s program, they will provide “technical support” for the 2018 mission.
While the US space agency is working towards manned missions in the 2030s, SpaceX hopes to send two payloads worth of experiments to Mars during a 2020 launch window. By that time, Musk said, several firms should be interested in conducting experiments on the Red Planet. In 2022, he hopes to launch what will be the first mission towards establishing a Mars colony.
Beyond that, Musk declined to provide specific details on his proposed missions, telling the Post that he would do so at a September conference. However, the newspaper pointed out that he was “clearly excited about the prospect and could barely contain himself.” The SpaceX chief himself said the project would be “mind blowing… It’s going to be really great.”
“I do want to emphasize this is not about sending a few people to Mars. It’s about having an architecture that would enable the creation of a self-sustaining city on Mars with the objective of being a multi-planet species and a true space-faring civilization and one day being out there among the stars,” he added. “It’s dangerous and probably people will die – and they’ll know that… [but] they’ll pave the way, and ultimately it will be very safe to go to Mars, and it will very comfortable. But that will be many years in the future.”
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Image credit: SpaceX
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