As of 2024 this industry disruption will be a reality, following the recent announcement of SpaceX regarding their Interplanetary Transport System. Elon Musk is planning for a Mars colony, starting of with an initial group of just ten people. Gradually, Musk is planning to grow this community into a more self-sustaining colony of at least a million people. Including cargo, this would take up more than 100.000 trips to Mars (Musk, 2016). Musk is hoping to offer a one-way Mars ticket for as low as 200.000 USD, the trip would approximately take up to 80 days. Consequently, by selling, for example, your house, you can have a life long holiday on Mars.
However, before SpaceX can start sending people to Mars, there are quite a few factors to consider, softly stated. For example the cosmic radiation provokes enormous health risks and deep space communication is still an infrastructure that SpaceX needs to develop (Patel, 2016). In addition, SpaceX needs to tackle the money and resource issues. Currently the costs of sending one person to Mars are 10 billion USD (Musk, 2016), therefore SpaceX needs to slash their expenses by 51.000 times to be able to offer the ride for a modest 200.000 USD. Regarding the available resources, currently there is no practical or sustainable technology to harvest the necessary resources from Mars (Patel, 2016). Finally, the international protocols of planetary protection prevent any nation or party in the world from seeding other worlds with life from Earth (Patel, 2016).
None of these factors makes it truly impossible to set up a colony, but these are definitely huge obstacles that SpaceX needs to overcome before 2024. One thing is certain; the developments of SpaceX will disrupt the space industry or actually the world as we know it right now.
Would you take the ride? I would rather plan another trip to the Colombia.
Sources:
Patel, N. 2016. Five Obstacles Keeping SpaceX from Colonizing Mars [online]. Available at: https://www.inverse.com/article/21650-five-biggest-obstacles-spacex-mars [Accessed 05-10-2016].
Musk, E. 2016. Elon Musk’s Mars Mission Revealed: SpaceX’s Interplanetary Transport System [online]. Available at: https://www.fastcompany.com/3064139/ elon-musks-mars-mission-revealed-spacexs-interplanetary-transport-system [Accessed 05-10-2016].
Thanks for your post, Robbert. I actually had the chance to tune in to the SpaceX conference live stream a week ago. It was great to see how devoted and passionate Elon Musk is to help out humanity, in spite of the gigantic financial sacrifices he makes for the project. For a second, I felt like the hype surrounding Mars colonisation silenced a bit, but today I stumbled across interesting news on this matter.
Yesterday, Boeing’s CEO Dennis Muilenburg declared that “he’s going to beat SpaceX to Mars in terms of delivering real humans to the surface of the red planet”. To be perfectly honest, until today I was not even aware that Boeing and SpaceX are close competitors with regards to commercial spaceflights (https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/05/a-new-private-space-race-as-boeing-ceo-says-hell-beat-spacex-to-mars/).
Achieving the goals you mentioned, in 8 years is definitely not an easy task. But as competition breeds progress, we can definitely hope that the development process accelerates. I myself would not be eager enough to travel to the “Red Planet” but I would definitely love to see other people succeed in doing so.
Hi Robbert and Krystian. Indeed, this is a very exciting topic. I watched the whole SpaceX conference too and it was a treat to see how Elon Musk with his peculiar way of speaking presented us a plan that should revitalize the whole business of space exploration, especially since there has not been much progress since we have landed people on the moon. The Q&A at the end of the conference where actually a bit awkward if you ask me. What did you think of the audience, Krystian?
It is good to read that Boeing is entering the stage, this keeps my hopes up. However, I came across this article on space.com (http://www.space.com/21554-mars-toxic-perchlorate-chemicals.html) which adds another rather big problem to the plan to colonize mars, next to the cosmic radiation, deep space communication and other challenges Robbert explains.
The article explains what the surface of Mars is made of, and it is just recently discovered. It turns out that the surface of mars consists of 1% of the highly toxic chemical calcium perchlorate. In low quantities this chemical interferes with our thyroid, and in high quantities it burns our longs, eyes and skin. Next to that, these particles are so small it is hardly impossible to wash them of suits.
It looks like there are some big hurdles to overcome. I have read the biography of Elon Musk and although he always has very optimistic deadlines, he is not the person to give up when missing a deadline because of a small problem like deadly chemicals.