Elon Musk Wants People on Mars by 2025!

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is quite ambitious.

Image source: TechCrunch

Elon wants to have people on Mars by 2025, and he thinks it’s not only likely, but probable.

Of course, all these could be subject to delays. The company had to delay the Falcon Heavy launch — Musk says the company hopes to launch it by the end of the year. But SpaceX has also managed to land several of its rockets, and it hopes to re-use those rockets in the next few months, he said.

Musk’s ambitions to visit Mars — or die there, for that matter — aren’t unknown. But Musk is also known for having an aggressive mentality when it comes to expanding his companies’ efforts to accomplish his goals. “If you gotta choose a place to die, then Mars is probably not a bad choice,” he said. “It’s not some sort of Martian death wish.”

SpaceX plans to start running the second version of its Dragon mission next year, which is capable of sending up to 7 astronauts into space, Musk said. From that, he expects the company to start missions to Mars with the Dragon V2 in 2018 — though it won’t necessarily start carrying astronauts just yet.

“The 2018 mission will be a Dragon V2, I wouldn’t recommend traveling to Mars in that,” Musk said. “It has the interior volume of an SUV. This will be a very big rocket. And it also doesn’t have the capability of getting back to earth. We’ll put that in fine print.”

Musk said that in September this year, he’s going to present the architecture for Mars colonization, and what it would require in order to transport a large number of people and a large amount of hardware to Mars. That’ll be necessary to create a self-sustaining and growing city on Mars, he said — and the company plans to start running missions at every opportunity starting on 2018. That means the company will be launching a mission approximately every 26 months, Musk said.

Image source: NASA