Hey, want to go to Mars? Well, according to Elon Musk, commercial flights from Earth to Mars may be available within as little as 30-years for the relatively reasonable cost of $500,000. Who’s Elon Musk you say? He’s the eccentric billionaire who created PayPal then sunk all his money into SpaceX, a company devoted to creating new reusable spacecraft and exploring our solar system. Sounds wacky, but this guy’s no kook — NASA has contracted Musk and SpaceX to supply the spacecraft that will transport goods and astronauts to the International Space Station once the Space Shuttle is retired.
The key to keeping costs down, according to Musk, is that the spacecraft that will go from Earth to Mars will all be reusable. Basically, you’ll just be paying for the rocket fuel to get you there and back — well, that and flight attendants and enough little bags of peanuts, cheese sandwiches and half-cans of Sierra Mist to keep you going for the 200-day flight.
To put this in perspective, if Musk isn’t juts crazy, one day you could visit the actual Mars for the same amount as Disney spent on 20-seconds of John Carter.
via io9
Mars via Shutterstock
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It would totally make sense to put space travelers in induced comas. The lack of movement would reduce caloric requirements and wouldn’t it be awesome to fall asleep and then wake up on Mars?
I agree, but believing an entrepreneur like Elon Musk on what will be possible 30 years from now is not exactly all that reliable. He is also the founder of Tesla, and while the cars are badass, the business hasn’t exactly toppled the other car companies from power. Big grain of salt here. SpaceX is the real deal though, got to tour the facility in December. At a political level: Does anyone else think about the real villains in Alien when thinking about privatized space travel?
Yeah, I wouldn’t trust Elon Musk with my life. If you leave one of his Tesla cars sitting for long enough for the battery to drain to 0%, you literally can’t recharge it and have to buy a new battery. Imagine he puts the same poorly-designed, easily-bricked battery in his spacecraft?
We don’t get to Mars until some crazy bastard just uses the near current technology and blasts himself there and we have to fetch him. Hard ride, but possible.
(still working on it)
Shouldn’t they take “Mars” out of the destination? I understand that doesn’t track well with travelers.
Not one Total Recall joke? I am disappoint.
Just imagine I said something about a 3-boobed alien instead of John Carter.
Gotta keep our stuff current.
We could be going there a lot f-ing sooner if Disney know how to market a movie properly.
privatising the solar system, one celestial object at a time…
but realistically, only the private sector has a chance to push space exploration/tation forward, keeping the costs down, not relaying on unlimited funds from the tax payer, actually have a plan to start reaping the resources from other planets (who cares? they’re useless and have no tress…)
Actually, it makes more sense to mine asteroids: you don’t have to fight gravity.
Elon Musk > hero