Yahoo News 9/30/2021
Three of the world’s billionaires are in a space race – but it appears one of them doesn’t have plans to go to space – at least, not yet. While billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos were on their first flight carrying civilians in their respective space companies, Elon Musk, who is the CEO of SpaceX, wasn’t on its first all-civilian flight – and has recently revealed he doesn’t have plans of going to space anytime soon, either. In an interview with Kara Swisher at the Code Conference 2021 Elon Musk described his space plans, which included “a self-sustaining city on Mars, and a base on the Moon for those who want to go there.”
Kara Swisher then asks a follow-up question whether Starship is so Musk can go to Mars, or so there can be a civilization on Mars, to which Musk responds, with the later. She also asks what’s first – Moon base or Mars, and Musk replies, ‘well, the Moon is close.’ Elon Musk has mentioned his plans of taking humans to Mars for a while – and he announced a timeline for it back in February this year. “Five and a half years,” Musk had said in an interview. While that’s not a hard deadline. Musk listed a number of caveats — there’s a raft of technological advances that must be made in the intervening years. “The important thing is that we establish Mars as a self-sustaining civilization,” he said.
The strange thing is the deadline may be a little ambitious, as even USA’s leading space agency, NASA, had a much more different date, one which is seven years after Musk’s time. The first humans aren’t due to arrive on Mars on a NASA funded rocket until at least 2033.
More:
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/elon-musks-goal-isnt-space-031027671.html
