Sources and billionaire Elon Musk himself have made statements that are considered crazy: Creating a new species for Mars, building a city in the next 20 years...
Elon Musk has directed SpaceX employees to delve into the design and details of a city on Mars, according to five people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The New York Times.
Busy preparing
Previously, the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX said that going to Mars was his lifelong goal.
Work is brisk at SpaceX, according to the sources. One team is planning small dome habitats. Another is working on spacesuits to withstand the harsh environment of Mars.
A medical team is even studying whether humans can have children there, and Mr Musk has volunteered to donate sperm to help “seed” the new “colony”, two of the sources said.
However, the above information was denied by Mr. Musk when interviewed after the New York Times published the report.
The initiatives are currently in their infancy, but Musk is clearly trying to speed up the timelines, the sources said.
In 2016, he said it would take 40 to 100 years for a self-sustaining civilization to form on the red planet. But in April this year, Mr. Musk told SpaceX employees that he expected to have 1 million people living in his Martian city within the next 20 years.
"There is a high urgency to create multi-planetary life. We must do it while civilization is strong," the billionaire, who many consider crazy, once declared in a video.
The Boring Company, a private tunneling venture founded by Mr Musk, was formed in part to prepare equipment to dig tunnels under the surface of Mars, two of the sources said.
The billionaire also said he bought the X so he could imagine what a citizen-led, consensus-based “government” would look like on another planet. He has also talked about Martians driving Tesla’s Cybertruck with steel panels.
"The Mars Train"
In 2018, SpaceX released two basic drawings of an alien colony. But Mr. Musk has largely kept his colonization plans under wraps because SpaceX, under its $2.9 billion contract with NASA, must first send a rocket to the moon.
To get to Mars, SpaceX has built Starship, a reusable rocket nearly 400 feet long. Starship's immediate purpose is to take NASA astronauts to the moon, but it is also expected to become a "Mars shuttle."
A planned version of the rocket could function as a small space station with living space at the nose, according to three people familiar with the rocket.
A rendering of the Starship interior, a version of which Mr. Musk posted on X, shows a violinist floating in zero gravity as she plays for a crowd. Future versions of Starship are expected to carry 100 passengers at a time.
By last year, the latest versions of Starship were being built at Starbase, a SpaceX facility in Boca Chica, Texas. In June, Starship successfully returned from its first test flight into space.
Over the years, Mr. Musk has repeatedly revealed his thoughts on how humans will live on Mars.
In 2013, he even talked about the possibility of creating “our own species” on the planet. In 2022, he talked about plans to create a heating system because Mars is very cold.
In May this year, Mr. Elon Musk wrote on X that he would send people to this neighboring planet in less than 10 years, build a city in about 20 years and ensure a Martian civilization by the next 30 years.
Meanwhile, NASA, which also has plans for a Mars base, believes it cannot send humans to the planet before the 2040s.