In October of last year, NASA expressed its interest in sending mankind to Mars to live there permanently, giving them the habitation tools necessary to survive on the red planet, which with its barren and lifeless surface, has recently been found to contain flowing water.
Now SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is sure that the company will be able to send human beings to Mars by 2025, as he noted in an interview with InvestHK, saying “I don’t think that hard, honestly:"
SpaceX is currently a part of commercial space program for NASA and creates rockets for helping to refuel the International Space Station; the company has also recently tried at two attempts to land a reusable Falcon 9 rocket back on Earth, with one attempt being successful and another being a failure. Reliability comes into question when suggesting they may one day carry humans to another planet.
Musk notes that mankind landed on the Moon and it was very much so one of the greatest accomplishments of the 20th century. Now, in the 21st century, Musk is determined to make the next move up in the chain, suggesting Mars as the next target and saying that we need to spread our civilization across the solar system and beyond to protect our race from disasters.
With the complications of doing a deep space mission like this that has never been done before, NASA is being required by the U.S. government to sketch up a Mars habitation prototype by 2018, which means before anything could possibly be done in the front of sending humans to Mars, NASA must first prove its feasibility by coming up with an approved functioning prototype.
Because it's never been done before, this is raising a lot of stressful decisions for not only NASA and SpaceX, but also for the government, who has to approve such a mission.
Clearly, safety is the number one thing on this future mission. There are plenty of things that can go wrong in launching a rocket full of people out of our atmosphere, and there is even more to go wrong when you send that rocket to another planet and expect it to land and expect those people to set up camp and build a habitation there.
Nevertheless, NASA themselves would like to see humans on Mars by 2030-2040, so is Musk’s estimate of 2025 a feasible estimate? Only time will tell.
Source: CNN Money
