Elon Musk Wants to Build a City on Mars

What do you do when you have a successful rocket company and billions of dollars to throw around? Start talking about building a city on Mars, of course! At least, that's what future world leader Elon Musk has decided to do. The eccentric billionaire talked to the Washington Post briefly about his plans, which would result in the founding of an 80,000 person city on Mars. Pretty ambitious, considering how hard it was to get Curiosity there!

Musk expects that people would be willing to pay to the tune of $500,000 to live on Mars. While that might result in a city devoid of a much needed working class, he's probably right. He also plans on moving people 10 at a time, probably on some variation of the Dragon capsule. That way the colony would expand slowly and under control.

Of course, it will be a while before Musk can do anything. The project's projected cost of $36 billion is out of even his reach. But we're talking about the only non-government entity to successfully launch into orbit, here. If anyone is prepared to tackle the challenges of colonizing Mars, it would be him. Besides, everyone thought he was a little nuts when he funded SpaceX, too. And look how that turned out.

This isn't the first time that Musk has talked about colonizing Mars. In fact, apparently that was the original thing to drive the founding of SpaceX. Musk's ambition has always been to make us a multi-planetary species. It's just that he's now managed to get himself into a position where that's possible. Heck, even NASA scientists are looking at current SpaceX technology for a Mars mission. It's completely possible that Musk will get us to Mars within his 10-15 year timeline.

Washington Post Photo by : OnInnovation