Why Is This Important? Elon Musk’s Mission To Mars?

Because Elon Musk is looking for pioneers to colonize Mars, but they could have to pay the ultimate price.

Long Story Short

Elon Musk has been cryptic about his dream to begin colonizing Mars within the decade, but he released a few new details Friday, including his plan to send rockets to Mars every two years. Musk also said he hasn’t yet decided who’ll be sent on an eventual human mission, but that volunteers would have to realize there’s a likely chance they won’t come back. 

Long Story

Ever sat in history class or opened up a book and thought — what would it have been like to be like Christopher Columbus in 1942 when he “sailed the ocean blue?” 
Sadly, pretty much the whole world has been mapped by now — except for the deep oceans — but there’s still vast expanses of space and planets out there to explore.
As you might’ve heard, lunatic billionaire genius/futurist/inventor CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk, wants to send a mission to start up a colony on Mars, not dissimilar from the pioneers colonizing the New World, but hopefully with less brutal genocide. Musk has already said he plans to send a human mission to Mars by 2025, but released a few more details in an interview with The Washington Post.

Beginning as soon as 2018, Musk plans to fly one of his Dragon rockets to space carrying experiments. Two years later in 2020, he plans to fly at least two rockets. Then, every two years starting in 2022, when Earth and Mars are closest, he’ll send shipments of experiments filled with cargo from companies who he says have already expressed interest in being part of the mission.
Musk said he was “so tempted to talk more about the details of [the Mars Colonial Transporter],” but just teased that its “going to be mind blowing. Mind blowing. It’s going to be really great.”

By 2024, he hopes to have the capability of sending a few humans on the voyage 140 million miles from Earth, but it’ll come at a dire cost.

“It’s dangerous and probably people will die — and they’ll know that,” he said to WaPo.

Musk emphasized that after a few people go, the plan is to build a full-out Martian city where humans could presumably go on summer holidays when the Earth is too scorching hot to inhabit. 

“But I do want to emphasize this is not about sending a few people to Mars,” he said. “It’s about having an architecture that would enable the creation of a self-sustaining city on Mars with the objective of being a multi-planet species and a true space-faring civilization and one day being out there among the stars.”

Naysayers have said starting Mars missions in 2018 is overly ambitious, especially considering the Dragon spacecraft and Falcon Heavy — the “most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two,” according to SpaceX — haven’t flown yet and the Dragon hasn’t been able to land using its own thrust, which will be key so as not to just crash-land on Mars. But Musk hopes to prove those haters wrong when he launches the rocket and its thrust power of 18, 747 airplanes high into the sky later this year. 
In other crazy Elon Musk news: He met with the Pentagon this week to discuss building an Iron Man-style metal suit. You gotta love this guy.