SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell was interviewed by CNBC where he was talking about reaching Mars. He said that people will be on Mars within this decade. Added that once they get a large delivery to the surface of Mars, people might then believe that it is possible.
This prediction goes along with that of SpaceX founder Elon Musk. The SpaceX chief executive made the comments talking to podcaster Lex Fridman at the end of last year. Fridman asked Musk for an estimation of how long it would take to reach the Red Planet, to which Musk replied: “Best case is about five years, worst case 10 years.”
This prediction is based, Musk said, on factors such as “engineering” the SpaceX Starship that would take humans there. “The fundamental optimization of Starship is minimizing the cost per ton to orbit and ultimately cost per ton to the surface of Mars”, he said. “There is a certain cost per ton to the surface of Mars where we can afford to establish a self-sustaining city, and above that, we cannot afford to do it.” Musk believes in terraforming and blasting the planet with nuclear weapons at its poles to cause the ice caps to melt and induce accelerated warming. That it will be a key component to live on other planets.
Life on Mars
“Life in glass domes at first. Eventually, terraformed to support life, like Earth,” he said. “Terraforming will be too slow to be relevant in our lifetime. But, we can establish a human base there in our lifetime. At least a future spacefaring civilization discovering our ruins will be impressed humans got that far.” The earliest inter-planet Starship missions could take place in 2024 or 2026 when the orbits of Earth and Mars line up. It will be a completely self-sufficient Mars colony that could be set up by around 2050, although all might not go smoothly. Martian settlers could grow increasingly autonomous and could slowly stop sharing information with mission control, according to a 120-day isolation test called Project Sirius of ‘colonists’ simulated in an extraterrestrial environment.
Also, during the test, which recreated pressurized chambers, lending operations, and a five-minute delay between the subjects and mission control. It was found that the crew quickly functioned confidently and worked collaboratively. “The communication characteristics of crew members with different personalities, genders, and cultures became more similar during the mission,” co-author Dmitry Shved of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Moscow Aviation Institute said.
