“I’m hopeful that the first people could be taken to Mars in 10, 12 years.” Musk said.
Elon Reeve Musk is the founder, CEO and lead designer of SpaceX. He is also the co-founder, CEO and product architect of Tesla Inc. He is the 53rd richest man on this planet according to Forbes latest report. Earlier he was declared the 21st most powerful man of the world. All this shows the worth and stature of this man. He learned computer programming at an age of 12. His first step towards becoming a business giant came when he co-founded Zip2. After that, he started X.com which was an online forum for making payments. It later turned into PayPal after joining with Confinity in 2000. eBay bought it for a whopping 1.5 billion USD in 2002.
It was that moment when Musk set his eyes on being an aerospace manufacturer and launched a company by the name of SpaceX. He aims to change the world and the humanity. The biggest desire that he wants to fulfill is to colonize Mars so that humans could have a safe and sustainable habitat there. According to him, this will save humans from extinction. For fulfillment of this dream, SpaceX has contracts of multiple trips to space through which they are gathering useful data to prepare the flight to Mars possible. The first part of it is to reach the red planet with humans. The more difficult part will then initiate which is to encounter the Martian climate which is not suitable at all for humans.
Recently, he launched Falcon Heavy into space with his Tesla Roadster in it. The entire occasion was covered by media from many parts of the world. People saw all the action live from their homes. Later, a video got viral which was related with this launch. An image with the mannequin ‘Starman’ driving Musk’s Tesla as Earth is seen in the background was the most impressive of these all. This journey of Falcon Heavy holds key significance as Musk himself said,
“If we are successful, it’s game over for other operators of heavy-lift rockets. It is like where one aircraft company has reusable aircraft and all the other aircraft companies had aircraft that were single-use, and you’d sort of parachute out at your destination and the plane would crash land somewhere. Crazy at it sounds, that’s how the rocket business works.”
Mars City project
Musk is so keen about the exploration of Mars that in an interview with CNBC he said that people could be walking on Mars in 10 to 12 years. His aims are clear as he wants to make humans a multi-planetary species. This will serve his purpose well as the extinction of humans could be prolonged if they are present at 2 different planets. He made following remarks in this regard:
“This is a very difficult thing, obviously. I’m hopeful that the first people could be taken to Mars in 10, 12 years. I think it’s certainly possible for that to occur. The thing that matters long term is to have a self-sustaining city on Mars. To make life multi-planetary. That will define a fundamental bifurcation of the future of human civilization. We’ll either be a multi-planet species and out there among the stars, or a single-planet species until some eventual extinction event, natural or man-made.”
Moving on to the second part of the job, how will Musk arrange for a sustainable city on Mars? The surface there is barren and radiations are too much for the human body. Among all these challenges, the greatest one is psychological that the travelers will have to subside to make this journey. The feeling of being away from home and cannot return back in any circumstances is simply FRIGHTENING. The continuous anxiety of being isolated from humanity is another terrible feeling that the potential Martians will have to endure. This issue was summed up by the following statement from a psychologist Claude Lorin,
“There are a lot of psychological issues that the first Martians will encounter in relation with the long duration of the journey to Mars.”
Musk knows all this yet he has not come up with any statement in this regard. His sole purpose is to somehow make this journey possible as he avoided such questions from multiple journalists and kept his focus on the Falcon 9 boosters.
