He wants to help establish a colony of up to 80,000 people on the planet, but admitted he’d like to start small, with a group of 10 people, and build the colony from there.
‘At Mars, you can start a self-sustaining civilisation and grow it into something really big,’ Musk said.
‘I think we’re making some progress in that direction – not as fast as I’d like.’
Musk was speaking to an audience at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London.
In April, SpaceX carried out a successful rocket test during which the firm launched a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket from Florida, after suffering three previous delays.
The rocket is reusable and it crashed into a target in the Atlantic Ocean shortly after the Dragon capsule delivered supplies to the International Space Station (ISS).
SpaceX is making ‘progress’ towards a Mars colony by 2020 – and tickets will cost $500,000, claims Elon Musk The Daily Mail
Mission to Mars: NASA gears up to send robotic laboratory and laser-armed rover to red planet The Daily Mail
Nasa’s most advanced mobile robotic laboratory, which will examine one of the most intriguing areas on Mars, is in final preparations for a launch from Florida’s Space Coast on November 25.
The Mars Science Laboratory mission will carry Curiosity, a rover with more scientific capability than any ever sent to another planet.
It will set down inside a huge crater and use its highly advanced instruments, including cameras and lasers, to find out more about the planet’s environment, which will help pave the way for human missions.
Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at Nasa Headquarters in Washington, said: ‘Mars Science Laboratory builds upon the improved understanding about Mars gained from current and recent missions.
‘This mission advances technologies and science that will move us toward missions to return samples from, and eventually send humans to, Mars.’
Farming their way to Mars: Gardeners and chefs likely to join astronauts on first trip to the Red Planet The Daily Mail
Astronauts on the first manned mission to Mars are likely to number horticultural experts and chefs as well as more traditional ex-military personnel.
Supplying enough food for a round trip to the Red Planet is one of the greatest challenges facing mission planners, experts were told yesterday.
One solution under consideration is for astronauts to grow their own food in a hi-tech ‘kitchen garden’
Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in Denver, Colorado, she said: ‘That’s a clear impediment to a lot of mission scenarios.
‘We need new approaches. Right now, we are looking at the possibility of implementing a bio-regenerative system that would involve growing crops in space and possibly shipping some bulk commodities to a Mars habitat as well.
‘This scenario involves much more food processing and meal preparation than the current food system developed for the space shuttles and the International Space Station.’
The nuclear-powered ‘space hopper’ that will leap across surface of Mars The Daily Mail
British scientists have designed a Mars hopper that could explore the Red Planet’s surface by leaping half a mile at a time.
It would be able to travel 400 miles during a six year mission – far further than Nasa’s intrepid Spirit Rover that managed to roll 15 miles over seven years.
The innovative vehicle would move by sucking in carbon dioxide from Mars’ atmosphere and compress it into fuel before blasting it out in much the same way as a rocket. It would take a week for the 63st vehicle to recharge. During this time it would carry out tests on Mars’ physical and chemical surface and subsurface.
Researchers from the University of Leicester unveiled their grand design in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A.
The Hundred Year Starship: The NASA mission that will take astronauts to Mars and leave them there forever The Daily Mail
NASA is planning an audacious mission to send a manned spacecraft on a one-way trip to permanently settle on other planets. The ambitious idea is known as the Hundred Years Starship and would send astronauts to colonise planets like Mars, knowing they could never come home.
NASA Ames Director Pete Worden revealed that one of NASA’s main research centres, Ames Research Centre, has received £1million funding to start work on the project. The research team has also received an additional $100,000 from NASA.
Life On Mars: The space-suit that’s being tested in a most unlikely spot The Daily Mail
A manned mission to Mars may still be more science fiction than science fact, but that hasn’t stopped a team of scientists from developing the perfect space suit for the first astronauts to set for on the Red Planet’s dusty surface.
Martian temperatures can plummet to 113 degrees below freezing, so the first men (or women) on Mars will need to wrap up warm.
The Austrian Airspace Forum, who are developing the suit, luckily have a suitably frosty testing environment right on their doorstep: ice tunnels beneath the Kaunertaler Glacier.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1300516/Life-On-Mars-The-space-suit-thats-tested-unlikely-spot.html?ito=feeds-newsxml#ixzz0vnW0ORkQ
Stunning image of what our planet looks like from the Red Planet The Daily Mail
This stunning picture is the first image of Earth ever taken from another planet that shows our home as a planetary disc, with the Moon in the distance.
Captured by Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as the spacecraft orbited the Red Planet, both the Earth and the Moon appear as crescents, engulfed in the vast darkness of space. Our planet is captured in a ‘half-Earth’ phase, while the image also shows the Earth-facing hemisphere of the Moon.
Because the Earth and the Moon are closer to the Sun than Mars, they exhibit phases, just as the Moon, Venus, and Mercury do when viewed from Earth.
Mars as you’ve never seen it before: The colossal ice walls that show another side of the Red Planet The Daily Mail
It looks like a filmmaker’s apocalyptic vision of Earth following a devastating natural disaster.
But this colossal ice formation is actually a portion of the wall terraces of a huge crater on Mars.
Approximately 37 miles in diameter, a section of the Mojave Crater in the planet’s Xanthe Terra region has been digitally mapped by Nasa scientists.
The result is this digital terrain model that was generated from a stereo pair of images and offers a synthesized, oblique view of a 2.5-mile portion of the crater’s wall terraces.
The Red Planet was once blue… Giant ocean once covered third of Mars The Daily Mail
A vast ocean once covered a third of Mars, scientists believe.
Such a stunning prospect greatly increases the chances of life having existed on the Red Planet, the fourth from the Sun in our solar system.
Researchers have come to the conclusion after using new software to analyse images of the surface. As a result, they have managed to find dozens of valleys to build up the most detailed map to date. The valleys, first spotted in 1971, were caused by a network of rivers more than twice as extensive as previously mapped. The water channels were in a belt between the equator and mid-southern latitudes.
The experts from Northern Illinois University and Nasa believe they mark the paths of rivers that once flowed from the planet’s southern highlands into a huge ocean in the north.
David Tennant: New Doctor Who special is ‘one of the scariest’ The Daily Mail
Doctor Who special The Waters of Mars is ‘one of the scariest’ according to star David Tennant.
The forthcoming special which sees the Timelord arrive on Mars in 2059 and battle terrifying zombie like aliens.
Viewers will see the Doctor meet the first human colony of people living on Mars, facing a battle to save them from a parasitic virus that makes them spurt water. In time honoured tradition the transformation scenes are sure to send children rushing to the back of the sofa.
The episode, which will broadcast on BBC1 on November 15, also shows him facing a moral dilemma about whether to condemn people to their fate or save them and ultimately change the future.