Elon Musk Wants to Build 80,000-Person Mars Colony
Elon Musk doesn’t just want to send a person to Mars — he wants to send 80,000. According to Space.com, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX spilled details about his hopes for a future Mars colony during a talk at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London on Nov. 16.
Earlier this year, SpaceX became the first private U.S. company to deliver cargo to the International Space Station. Musk has never been shy about his ambitions to take human colonists to another planet, mentioning in the past that he wants to provide flights to Mars for about $500,000 a person. But now he’s talking about building a small-city-sized settlement on the Red Planet, starting with a 10-person crew in the coming decades to begin establishing and building infrastructure.
That first flight would be expensive and risky but “once there are regular Mars flights, you can get the cost down to half a million dollars for someone to move to Mars,” Musk told Space.com. ”Then I think there are enough people who would buy that to have it be a reasonable business case.” Musk added that he sees the future 80,000-person colony as a public-private enterprise costing roughly $36 billion.
So you pay $500,000 to be one of 80,000 people who will move to Mars. But it would be far more expensive to bring someone back from Mars, so I'm thinking most of the 80,000 settlers on Mars would stay there the rest of their lives. I wonder if that many people could both pay the half mil. and would want to stay on Mars the rest of their lives.
One bad thing: very long lag times (10 or 20 minutes each way?) for the internet. If some Buffistas were on Mars there would be much x-posting