How Does SpaceX Plan To Move Thousands Of Humans To Mars?

December 14, 2012 - SpaceX founder/Tony Stark movie inspiration Elon Musk made some heads turn this week, as heads are wont to do when they hear someone plans to ship 80,000 people to Mars. In a talk at the Royal Aeronautical Society, Musk offered early ideas on how to start a colony on the Red Planet. Then, yesterday, he doubled down with a tweet.


Millions of people needed for Mars colony, so 80k+ would just be the number moving to Mars per year news.yahoo.com/huge-mars-colo…

So, to recap: Musk wants his private spaceflight business to send 80,000 people to Mars every year. They're not going to do that themselves, probably, but the company would certainly be leading the charge.

How are they going to do that?

Well, as Talking Points Memo writes, one of SpaceX's big pushes is for reusable rockets. We've had something like that in the form of NASA's classic space shuttles, but the refurbishing, Musk has said, is too much to truly make repeat space-travel cost-effective. In the RAS talk, he says that technology is still some time away--maybe five to six years before we can fully reuse a craft.