SpaceX Wants You to Start Saving for a Trip to Mars Rae Paoletta - Gizmodo
go to original April 8, 2017

First tourist trip around the moon planned for 2018 (Al Jazeera English)

Elon Musk wants to take you to Mars, but he also wants your sweet Earthling dollars to do that - hundreds of thousands of them, at least. With SpaceX’s most recent success, in which the company launched a reused rocket into orbital space for the first time ever, Mars enthusiasts and billionaires alike are buzzing to get to the Red Planet.

“I hope you’re all thinking about your tickets to Mars,” Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, told attendees at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs this week, according to reporting by Inverse.“[Reusability is] really a tremendous capability, and I highly recommend it for all of you,” she added.

Musk first introduced a $200,000 price tag for future SpaceX-led trips to Mars on September 2016 at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, in which he discussed his plans to make humans “a multiplanetary species.” The plan relies heavily on SpaceX using refurbished rockets to drive down launch costs, which would hypothetically save Martian tourists some cash, too.

But even with reusable rockets, it’s probably going to cost considerably more than $200,000 to send humans to live on Mars. Ella Atkins, a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan, remains skeptical of that figure, especially if it involves sustaining people once they’ve landed.

“Just from a basic analysis of rockets and gravity, and then doing some back of the envelope calculations on how much you need to take with you to sustain people... 200,000 seems very ambitious” she told Gizmodo. “But there are some politics here - how many people are going to really going to get behind a company if SpaceX told them, ‘Yeah, it’s going to cost a million dollars to go to Mars.’”

The $200,000 price tag provides people with a sense of hope.

Read the rest at Gizmodo

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