Elon Musk addresses the International Astronautical Congress, Sept. 27, 2016. <\/p>\n
SpaceX <\/p>\n
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has given more details about his plan to colonize Mars. <\/p>\n
Play Video <\/p>\n
Space entrepreneur and Tesla founder Elon Musk unveiled a plan this week for putting a permanent human colony on the red planet. Musk estimates i... <\/p>\n
Musk answered what he called great questions in a RedditAsk Me Anything session on Sunday. Many of the questions were highly technical, coming from SpaceX fans who have been following Musks public plans for colonization since the beginning. <\/p>\n
The session was a follow up to Musks comments at a space conference in Mexico last month during which he unveiled his plan to send up to one million people to Mars over the next 100 years. <\/p>\n
In that speech, Musk said that his companys rocket, spacecraft and economies of scale would bring the cost of Mars travel down to $200,000 per ticket compared to $10 billion per ticket, the estimate in todays dollars for sending an astronaut using the Apollo moon mission architecture. <\/p>\n
Musk envisions 1,000 passenger ships flying en masse to the red planet, Battlestar Galactica style. <\/p>\n
He elaborated on that plan Sunday, explaining that first an unmanned ship will be sent to Mars with equipment to build a plant to create refueling propellant for return trips to Earth. He says the first manned mission would have the job of constructing the plant. <\/p>\n
The initial crew would comprise about a dozen people. After that, Musk wrote, he hopes to double the number of flights with each Earth-Mars orbital rendezvous, which is every 26 months, until the city can grow by itself. <\/p>\n
Musk said last month SpaceX is already working on equipment for the project. <\/p>\n
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