BROWNSVILLE — SpaceX’s Boca Chica launch site may some day be a departure point for flights to Mars.
That’s according to the company’s founder, Elon Musk, in a presentation yesterday at the International Aeronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Musk’s talk, which was streamed live online, laid out highly technical, detailed plans for development of a space vehicle capable of getting humans to the red planet in sufficient numbers to colonize it, build a city and create a self-sustaining civilization.
His primary goal, and the sole reason he’s busy accumulating assets, is to do the best thing Musk can think of for humankind: make it an interplanetary species in order to ensure its survival, he said.
“What I really want to achieve here is to make Mars seem possible, something we can do in our lifetimes,” Musk said.
One of the biggest obstacles is making the per-passenger cost of a trip relatively affordable, he said. With the traditional approach that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon, a single ticket to Mars would cost about $10 billion, Musk said.
For the rest of this story and many other EXTRAS, go to our premium site, www.MyValleyStar.com.
Subscribe to it for only $6.99 per month or purchase a print subscription and receive the online version free, which includes an electronic version of the full newspaper and extra photo galleries, links and other information you can’t find anywhere else.
