Published 14:56 IST, January 18th 2020
Elon Musk reveals plans to send 10 lakh people to Mars by 2050
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has revealed that he hopes to send close to 10 lakh people to Mars by the year 2050 and also revealed how he plans on achieving his goal
In a Twitter thread, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has revealed that he hopes to send close to 10 lakh people to Mars by the year 2050 and also revealed how he plans on achieving his goal and the resources required to colonise the Red Planet. He also wrote that he wished to make humans a 'multi-planetary species'.
Plans to put people on Mars
While talking more about how exactly he would go about accomplishing this daunting task, Musk said that a rocket would have to carry many megatons of cargo every year to the Red Planet in order to prepare Mars for human presence by mid-century.
Musk explained that the goal is to send 1,000 flights a year with each ship carrying 100 tonnes of cargo. Therefore the cargo of 10 ships would be 1 megaton. The ships that would be used is the SN1 that is currently under construction a SpaceX's Texas facility.
The ships though will only be able to launch once every 2 years during the orbital sync between Earth-Mars which is when the two planets are closest to each other. September last year SpaceX requested NASA to provide it with potential landing site on the red planet.
Musk added that in order for Mars to become habitable, it had to make warmer and suggested launching thermonuclear weapons in order to create tiny "suns" over the regions. This would help release all the frozen carbon dioxide gas and trigger a man-made greenhouse effect. He has also estimated that the cost of making Mars self-sustaining is somewhere between $100 billion and $10 trillion.
Updated 14:56 IST, January 18th 2020