At the ReCode's Code Conference on Wednesday, June 1, the Tesla and SpaceX Chief Elon Musk announced his ambitious timetable to send humans on Mars by 2024.
According to The Verge, Elon Musk has plans of landing people on Mars within the next decade. The SpaceX CEO said he hopes sending people to Mars as early as 2024, with a landing scheduled for 2025. He also expressed his desire to eventually travel on the Red Planet himself.
Earlier this year, in April, SpaceX announced its plans for an uncrewed mission to Mars by the year 2018. The mission would have the purpose to test out ways to land on the Red Planet. For the foreseeable future, Musk said SpaceX would not stop transporting cargo, and even people to Mars.
Musk did not go into concrete details about his Mars colonization plans. He only explained that starting a colony would involve sending a lot of hardware and a lot of people.
Musk added that in September, at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico, he will reveal the full extent of his Mars colonization ideas. The event is an annual meeting of major leaders in the space industry.
Given that NASA does not plan on sending people to Mars until at least the 2030s, Musk's timetable of human exploration on Mars within the next 10 years is an extremely ambitious schedule. But later in the talk, Musk explained that even if this is an ambitious deadline, he thinks it is possible to achieve.
According to Popular Mechanics, Musk not only confirmed his plan to send a manned spacecraft to Mars as early as 2024 but also has talked about living on Mars, the AI and the future. He even adventured into politics and discussed hypothetical forms of government on the Red Planet, highlighting the idea that people on Mars should vote for everything themselves.
To Musk, a representative democracy like America's would not be the ideal strategy for Martian governance. Musk would rather see a direct democracy where the people themselves vote on the issues, instead of electing representatives to stand for the people in the House and the Senate and vote on their behalf.
