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posted by janrinok on Sunday October 02 2016, @02:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-a-way-to-go dept.

If I died today it'd be a holiday... on Mars. Elon Musk has suggested that the first Martian settlers should be prepared to die:

The first people who fly with SpaceX to Mars should be OK with the possibility that the decision could cost them their lives, company founder and CEO Elon Musk said. SpaceX aims to ferry 1 million people to the Red Planet over the next 50 to 100 years using the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), a rocket-spaceship combo that Musk unveiled Tuesday (Sept. 27) during a talk at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico. (Well, he unveiled the ITS in concept; neither vehicle has been built yet.)

Musk painted a picture of a not-too-distant future in which 1,000 or more ITS spaceships, each loaded up with 100 or 200 settlers, zoom off toward Mars simultaneously from Earth orbit. But it's naïve to expect that everything will work perfectly from the start, he said. "I think the first journeys to Mars are going to be really very dangerous. The risk of fatality will be high; there's just no way around it," Musk said at the IAC, adding that, for this reason, he would not suggest sending children on these flights. "It would be, basically, 'Are you prepared to die?' If that's OK, then, you know, you're a candidate for going," he said. Musk said he'd like to go to Mars, but it's unclear if he'll be among the Red Planet vanguard.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 02 2016, @03:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 02 2016, @03:33PM (#409085)

    1,000 or more ITS spaceships, each loaded up with 100 or 200 settlers, zoom off toward Mars simultaneously

    SpaceX aims to ferry 1 million people to the Red Planet over the next 50 to 100 years

    (emphasis mine)

    Not seeing the discrepancy... If anything, it seems odd they're planning only 5-10 full-fleet launches in 50 to 100 years, but I expect some of those ships will be loaded with extra supplies.