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Creating sustainable city on Mars will take 20 years, according to Elon Musk

Elon Musk has some pretty insane ideas when it comes to humanity colonising Mars, including nuking the planet to make it livable one day.

The SpaceX CEO has never held back on his thoughts when it comes to space travel, and now he has weighed in what it would take to create a sustainable city on the red planet.

Replying to a few fans on Twitter, his favourite medium, Musk explained some of the costs involved for launching one of the company’s Starships, which is estimated at $2 million per launch. This figure was given with the view to starting a self-sustaining city on Mars one day.

In order to complete such an objective, which certainly falls within the realm of SpaceX’s mission to make humans an interplanetary species, the company would need to build and launch as many as 1 000 Starships.

These of course would carry the necessary payloads required for inhabiting Mars, and could be achieved in the space of 20 years, according to Musk. This he points out is as a result of planetary alignment making travelling to Mars only possible every two years.

With SpaceX wanting to get its Starship project up and running by as early as 2022, it’s certainly conceivable that such a sustainable city goal can be made in many of our lifetimes.

Whether NASA or the US government would greenlight such an ambitious and expensive project is unclear, with the former having only planned to have a successful Moon mission by 2024, putting Mars somewhere in the very distant future.

It remains to be seen if the SpaceX CEO was indeed serious about some of the numbers he has posited, but if anyone can pull something crazy like that together, it is Elon Musk.

[Image – Photo by Nicolas Lobos on Unsplash]

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