The SpaceX Mars mission is still on the table, but founder Elon Musk just put his company on a relatively tight deadline.
SpaceX Chief Engineer Elon Musk speaks in front of Crew Dragon cleanroom at SpaceX Headquarters in Hawthorne, California on October 10, 2019.
According to the massively popular billionaire, he believes that his space exploration company would be able to put a man on the Red Planet within just 10 years in what he calls a "worst case scenario," according to a report by News.com.au.
He basically meant that under better circumstances, SpaceX wouldn't even need to wait a decade before landing a human crew on Mars.
He did, however, explain the situation in which this bold claim would be possible. For one, the actual vehicle that would carry the human crew must be "engineered quickly," while mentioning his company's most advanced project yet-Starship.
Musk also claims that Starship is humanity's most complex and advanced rocket in history. However, his company is also working on minimizing its overall cost, including the Mars mission as a whole.
When the cost of building, launching, and landing the rocket on the Red Planet is further optimized, that will be the only time that establishing a self-sustaining habitat on Mars is feasible.
Right now, a flight to Mars is already prohibitively expensive-and it doesn't even involve human crews yet.
The Perseverance Mars Rover, for instance, costs $2.7 billion in total, according to Planetary.org. The rover itself already accounts for $2.2 billion of that entire price tag, with the rest of the money going into operational costs.
In this concept illustration provided by NASA, NASA's Perseverance (Mars 2020) rover will store rock and soil samples in sealed tubes on the planet's surface for future missions to retrieve in the area known as Jezero crater on the planet Mars. A key objective for Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life.
But that's not all. In order for an individual to travel to the Red Planet and possibly stay there, they would have to spend as much as "a trillion dollars," according to Musk, as per the original News.com.au report.
The Big Tech mogul is one of the world's staunchest proponents of establishing a permanent human settlement on the Red Planet. His plans for the first-ever city there, called Nuwa, have its construction beginning in the 2020s-not the original 2054 estimate.
Read also: Nuwa, the First City on Mars, Will Be Ready in 2100, Developer ABIBOO Reveals Plans and Function
SpaceX Mars Mission: Money Matters
Among the most important aspects of SpaceX's vision for Mars settlement involves costs, making or breaking all plans. That's because If Musk's plans to optimize further the cost of a mission to the Red Planet does succeed, then moving to another world will be a far more financially feasible venture.
According to a report by CNBC, the SpaceX founder plans to reduce the cost of moving to Mars to as little as below $500,000-even below $100,000 per ton of gear and supplies, if things go as planned.
Considering the current cost of ongoing Mars missions, this seems like a tall order. But this is the multi-billionaire's vision: one where people could easily save up and get a ticket to another planet if they wanted to.
Related: SpaceX: CO2 to Rocket Fuel? Elon Musk Reveals New Program, Asks People to Join; Important for Mars
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Written by RJ Pierce
