PA / SpaceXIt’s time to start saving if you ever plan on seriously visiting Mars in the future.
Elon Musk is making it his goal for space travel to be made affordable, despite his company SpaceX’s interplanetary Starship not even leaving Earth yet.
In a tweet on Sunday (February 10), Musk said moving to the red planet would potentially cost $500,000 or less.
Very dependent on volume, but I’m confident moving to Mars (return ticket is free) will one day cost less than $500k & maybe even below $100k. Low enough that most people in advanced economies could sell their home on Earth & move to Mars if they want.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 11, 2019
SpaceX is currently working on completing its starship, the reusable stainless steel rocket that is expected to transport 100 space tourists to Mars in just one go. While half-a-million USD seems likes a lot of money for a single flight, Musk makes it clear that people could sell their homes on Earth in order to permanently move to Mars. The return ticket is free so that’s a bonus!
$500,000 is also relatively cheap in comparison to the packages currently planned by Virgin Galactic. Taking a vacation at a luxury space hotel orbiting Earth would cost $9.5million, according to CNET.
Some would argue that it’s a lot of money to visit and then find out that there really isn’t much there. It would be an awful amount just to find out that rocks are actually quite boring if you stare at them for too long.
Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, colonising Mars won’t be an easy task with a lot of trips back and forth between Earth. Not to mention the amount of tests and data which need to be collated before humans will trust moving planets is safe.
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Elon Musk has previously described how he wants to launch an unmanned cargo mission to the red planet in 2022, with a manned mission to follow in 2024.
Marco Cáceres, a senior space analyst at the Teal Group told Business Insider that Elon is preparing for the future:
He wants to have two planets for humans to live on. Some people call it crazy, but it kind of makes some sense. If something were to happen to our planet, we have an option.
It was announced in September 2018 that the first private passenger to fly in space would be the Japanese billionaire and art collector Yusaku Maezawa. But who will follow?
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Matt Weston is a lover of electric cars, artificial intelligence and space. From Cornwall, he’s a UCLan graduate that still dreams of being a Formula One driver in the very near future. Previously work includes reporting for regional newspapers and freelance video for the International Business Times.