SpaceX Founder Elon Musk Proposes Colony on Planet Mars

Elon Musk

With SpaceX encouraging Florida, Puerto Rico, Texas and now Georgia to up the ante for a commercial rocket launch site, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has focused his entrepreneurial  eyes much farther into space.

Musk recently appeared before the Royal Aeronautical Society in London to solicit support for his plan to colonize Mars.  Musk foresees a colony inhabited by as many as 80,000 people with the funding coming largely from those who wish to be part of the colony.

An estimated travel cost of $500,000 per person multiplied by 80,000 could generate 40 billion dollars.  Actually, Musk estimates it would cost only 36 billiion to get the colony up and running.  While not holding firmly to the $500,000 entry price, Musk stated that the fee "would 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."   Even with 40 billion worth of ticket sales, Musk figures some public money would be needed to get the project off the ground.

Musk said the Mars colony  would start small, becoming self-sufficient over time.  Needed to be transported to Mars would be "large amounts of equipment, including machines to produce fertilizer, methane and oxygen for Mars' atmospheric nitrogen and carbon dioxide and surface water ice", according to Musk.  He states that the settlers would build "transparent domes which when pressurized with Mars' atmospheric CO2 could grow Earth crops in Martian soil."

Meanwhile, on Earth, the environmental feasibility study results for Boca Chica beach is due in January.