Elon Musk has made new claims about how long it will take to colonize Mars.
The tech mogul has had his sights set on the Red Planet for a long time and has recently said that he believes SpaceX could achieve ‘self sustaining life’ on Mars in a relatively short amount of time.
Musk made this revelation during an interview with Fox News presenter Sean Hannity yesterday (March 18).
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During the chat, the SpaceX founder shared the firm’s latest breakthroughs with its Starship rocket.
Musk said: “Starship is the first rocket that has the potential to make life multi-planetary, make us a multi-planet civilization for the first time in the history of Earth and that’s truly profound.”
The billionaire also said: “We are going to be able to take astronauts to Mars, in fact we want to take anyone who goes to Mars and ultimately build a self-sustaining civilization on Mars.
“That is the long-term goal of the company, to make life multi-planetary.”
Hannity replied: “That is a very bold vision, how long do you think that might take SpaceX to be able to accomplish?”
To which Musk revealed: “I think we could do it in 20 to 30 years.”
SpaceX anticipates that Starship will have the ability to travel 140 million miles to the Red Planet in a journey time of six months.
It is also hoped that it will be capable of refueling there before making the return trip.
This will be done by ‘leveraging Mars’ natural H2O and CO2 resources to refuel on the surface of Mars’.
According to the SpaceX site: “Mars is about half again as far from the Sun as Earth is, so it still has decent sunlight. It is a little cold, but we can warm it up.
“Its atmosphere is primarily CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements, which means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere.
“Gravity on Mars is about 38% of that of Earth, so you would be able to lift heavy things and bound around. Furthermore, the day is remarkably close to that of Earth.”
Previously, Musk has shared that humans could be taking off for Mars as early as 2029 if all goes well with the first missions, which are due to begin by the end of 2026.
Although, the billionaire admitted on his own social media platform X, formerly Twitter, that 2031 is more likely.