Elon [SpaceX] Wants 10 People Colony in Mars
Elon Musk, South African-American entrepreneur and inventor best known for founding SpaceX, and co-founding Tesla Motors and PayPal, said he wants to build a small colony of vegetarians on Mars — according to The Register.
"At Mars, you can start a self-sustaining civilization and grow it into something really big," Musk told an audience at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London, according to Space.com.
The entrepreneur, who oversaw the construction of the first electric car of the modern era as well as the privately funded rocket and spaceship Falcon 9 Dragon, wants to start his vegetarian Mars colony with just ten people or so, flown to the red planet on a "huge reusable rocket powered by liquid oxygen and methane."
Musk added that a ticket for the unprecedented enterprise should be "relatively affordable." "The ticket price needs to be low enough that most people in advanced countries, in their mid-forties or something like that, could put together enough money to make the trip," he said.
Musk added that the first folks heading to Mars would have machines to produce fertilizer, oxygen and methane from Mars' atmosphere and subsurface water ice with them on the big booster, as well as construction materials to build big transparent domes to grow Earth crops in.
The colony could reach 80,000 people if one in 100,000 wanted to go by the time the trip is possible (when Earth's population will be around 8 billion). The enterprise would be a partnership between the government and the private sector.
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