Elon Musk’s Plans for the SpaceX Mars Mission

2025 is going to be a groundbreaking year for Earth, as well as for our soon-to-be second home, planet Mars. Elon Musk has recently announced his plan for SpaceX to colonize Mars by January 2025. SpaceX has put over a decade’s worth of research and development into building and testing rockets that, apart from the recent explosion of a Falcon 9 rocket, have generally launched and landed successfully. Elon Musk is now confident enough to enter into his next phase.

Elon Musk plans for Mars to be inhabited by around 1 million people. He justifies this number by explaining that Mars would be self-sustainable with this amount of people even if SpaceX runs out of resources to transport more people to Mars. He claims that the first humans will set foot on Mars in January 2025, and that the mission will be completed by 2074, when he estimates the population will surpass 1 million.

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Although Elon Musk’s plan seems as if it is not too far off from now, the plan is still very much in its early developmental stages. While SpaceX has successfully launched and landed many rockets, a great deal of testing still needs to be done in the next nine years. The first step in Musk’s plan is to land the Dragon spacecraft in July 2018, which would carry the first shipment of cargo to Mars. If this mission is successful, SpaceX will continue to transport more cargo to Mars, leading up to the Maiden BFS voyage in December 2022 — this is the mission in which SpaceX plans to send the last shipment of cargo.

By 2025, Elon Musk may have figured out how to prevent human extinction in the event of any major disasters. With global warming on the rise and more scientific research revealing its danger, having a second planet for humans on Earth to turn to may be one of the most helpful solutions that has been proposed to date.