Mars colony of 80,000 in 20 yrs: SpaceX CEO

Elon Musk reveals ambitious plan to set up base on Red Planet by ferrying explorers for $500K a head

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip. 

    In Musk's vision, the ambitious Mars settlement program would start with a pioneering group of fewer than 10 people, who would journey to the Red Planet aboard a huge reusable rocket powered by liquid oxygen and methane.

    Accompanying the founders of the new Mars colony would be large amounts of equipment, including machines to produce fertilizer, methane and oxygen from Mars’ atmospheric nitrogen and carbon dioxide and the planet's subsurface water ice.

    The Red Planet pioneers would also take construction materials to build transparent domes, which when pressurized with Mars’ atmospheric CO2 could grow Earth crops in Martian soil. As the Mars colony became more self sufficient, the big rocket would start to transport more people and fewer supplies and equipment.

    Musk’s $500,000 ticket price for a Mars trip was derived from what he thinks is 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, comparing the purchase to buying a house in California. He also estimated that of the eight billion humans that will be living on Earth by the time the colony is possible, perhaps one in 100,000 would be prepared to go. That equates to potentially 80,000 migrants.
    Musk figures the colony program — which he wants to be a collaboration between government and private enterprise — would end up costing about $36 billion. He arrived at that number by estimating that a colony that costs 0.25 percent or 0.5 percent of a nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) would be considered acceptable.
    The United States' GDP in 2010 was $14.5 trillion; 0.25 percent of $14.5 trillion is $36 billion. If all 80,000 colonists paid $500,000 per seat for their Mars trip, $40 billion would be raised.

Spaceship
SpaceX is already testing what Musk calls a next-generation, reusable Falcon 9 rocket that can take off vertically and land vertically. The prototype, called Grasshopper, is a Falcon 9 first stage rocket with landing legs.
    Musk emphasized that only fully reusable rockets and spacecraft would keep the ticket price for Mars migration as low as $500,000. Grasshoper has made two short flights.
    The first was on September 21 and reached a height of 2 meters; the second test, on November 1, was to a height of 5.4 m. A planned milestone for the Grasshopper project is to reach an altitude of 30 m.

Life on Mars

Elon Musk

A world-famous entrepreneur and inventor, Musk is best known for founding SpaceX, co-founding Tesla Motors as well as PayPal. Musk's early work oversaw construction of the first battery electric sports car with Tesla Motors. SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft made history in May when becoming the first commercial vehicle in history to dock at the International Space Station. The 41-year-old has a net worth of 2.4 billion according to Forbes.

Pioneering the red planet
• One-way tickets would cost $500,000
• First batch of pioneers would build sustainable housing of transparent domes pressurized with CO2, which will help Mars soil to grow crops
• Eventually population would reach 80,000 - a number estimated from belief that one out of every 100,000 would desire to go into deep space
• Project estimated to cost $36 billion