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Elon Musk Says There's a '70 Percent' Chance He'll Move to Mars

posted by Fnord666 on Monday November 26 2018, @10:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-forget-to-say-goodbye dept.

martyb writes:

Elon Musk Says There's a '70 Percent' Chance He'll Move to Mars:

Elon Musk has talked about personally heading to Mars before, but how likely is he to make the trip, really? Well, he just put a number on it. In an interview for the Axios on HBO documentary series, Musk said there was a "70 percent" chance he'll go to Mars. There have been a "recent number of breakthroughs" that have made it possible, he said. And as he hinted before, it'd likely be a one-way trip -- he expects to "move there."

The executive also rejected the idea that traveling to Mars could be an "escape hatch for the rich" in its current form. He noted that an ad for going to Mars would be "like Shackleton's ad for going to the Antarctic," which (though likely not real) made clear how dangerous and the South Pole journey was. Even if you make it to Mars, you'll spend all your time building the base and struggling to survive harsh conditions, Musk said. And while it might be possible to come back, it's far from guaranteed. As with climbing Everest, Musk believes it's all about the "challenge."

The interview is available on YouTube.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday November 27 2018, @02:55PM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <{takyon} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Tuesday November 27 2018, @02:55PM (#766927) Journal

    He has at least 15-20 years to reconsider his position, and he's already talked about his desire to "die on Mars, but not on impact". It's a non-story. Other details are more interesting:

    https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-ceo-elon-musk-mars-breakthroughs-starship-design-radical-changes/ [teslarati.com]

    Ironically, in the middle of writing this article, Musk tweeted specifically about “fundamental” changes to the spaceship, leaving little more than the general appearance and propulsion systems unchanged. In essence, the design of BFS/Starship is now almost unrecognizable when compared with past iterations, at least from a perspective of the ship’s most critical systems.If Starship will not be built out of composites, then it’s possible that the multiple years SpaceX engineers and technicians have spent trying to develop large carbon composite propellant tanks (2016-present) and the time, energy, and capital put into those efforts will be almost entirely for naught if BFR pivots away from composite tanks.

    By all appearances, dozens of employees have spent the last year accepting delivery of $10-50M worth of custom-built composite tooling, setting it up, and building giant composite tank domes and segments. If composite tanks are no longer planned for the booster or spaceship, all that work may have been for nothing. Needless to say, we could certainly do for Musk’s proposed Reddit AMA – if not an entirely new BFR update event – to shed some light on the machinations behind these earthshaking programmatic changes.

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  • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday November 28 2018, @03:57PM (1 child)

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Wednesday November 28 2018, @03:57PM (#767327) Journal

    Your post reminded me about the fictional D.D. Harriman [wikipedia.org]. I'd suspect that if Musk ever does make a Mars mission happen that he would be the last person in the world SpaceX would allow to make the flight. He'd be too valuable as the CEO. Unless he resigned... in which case they'd still be foolish to let him go because it would then smack of corruption.

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    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 28 2018, @05:28PM

      by takyon (881) <{takyon} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Wednesday November 28 2018, @05:28PM (#767369) Journal

      His value may be greatly overestimated. Musk has already set the company on the path to deploying a fully reusable rocket, made several major alterations to the rocket's design, and has laid out the plans for the company to become a satellite ISP. They just have to execute now.

      Once BFR (or "Starship Super Heavy") is working, I don't really care about the Mars-related stuff. Just its low Earth orbit capability and cost per launch alone will allow it to revolutionize access to space. We can start talking about putting up cheap and gigantic space stations, super large space telescopes including modular ones, etc. And we could send many heavy and cheap probes and rovers to Mars and the outer solar system.

      I think losing Gwynne Shotwell [bloomberg.com] might be a greater blow to SpaceX at this point.

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