I think it’s a really fundamental decision we need to make as a civilization: What kind of future do we want? Do we want a future where we are forever confined to one planet until some eventual extinction event however far in the future that might occur? or do we want to become a multi-planet species and then ultimately be out there among the stars, among many planets, many star systems? I think the latter is a far more exciting and inspiring future than the former. There's the defensive reason: Backing up the biosphere and protecting the future of humanity. Ensuring that the light of consciousness is not extinguished should some calamity befall Earth, by becoming a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species. Which I hope you agree is the right way to go. But personally I find what gets me more excited is the fact that this would be an incredible adventure. It would be the greatest adventure in human history... ever. It would be exciting and inspiring, and there needs to be things that excite and inspire people. There needs to be reasons why you get up in the morning. You can't just be solving problems, it's got to be 'something great is going to happen in the future.'
I think we should really be setting the goal for the creation of a self-sustaining civilization on Mars, not simply a mission to Mars. Yeah, it'd be awesome, and cool, and it'd be a new high altitude record, and great pictures and stuff, but it just would not be the thing that fundamentally changes the future of humanity.
At this point, I'm certain there is a way. I'm certain that success is one of the possible outcomes for establishing a growing Mars colony, I'm certain that that is possible. Whereas until maybe a few years ago I was not sure that success was even one of the possible outcomes.
That's the thing that we should be aiming for long-term, that's the thing that will ensure that civilization continues, and the light of consciousness is not extinguished. Those seem like good things to me. It’s kind of amazing that this window of opportunity is open for life to go beyond Earth. We just don’t know how long that window is going to be open. So yeah, I think that's what we should strive for. That's I think the critical thing for maximizing the life of humanity; how long will our civilization last. If we are a multi-planet species it's likely to last a lot longer.
Just to sort of put things in perspective, sort of give you a better sense for the real scale of the Solar System for where things are. We're currently on the third little rock from the Sun, that's Earth, and our goal is to go to the fourth rock — that's Mars. Sometimes people wonder, what about other places in the Solar System, why Mars? Well, our options for becoming a multi-planet species within our Solar System are limited. Just by process of elimination, it's the place where one can establish a self-sustaining civilization and really grow it to something significant - really big - where in a worst case scenario if something were to happen to Earth you have redundancy.
If you look at the various planets we got Mercury, which is too close to the Sun, the rocks melt on Mercury. Obviously just way too close to the Sun. There may be some mere habitable zone on the back side of Mercury but I think one is sort of asking for trouble on that one.
Then we have, in terms of nearby options, we've got Venus. Venus is still pretty hot, it's several hundred degrees. The atmosphere is high-pressure and it's acidic. I wouldn't recommend Venus. Venus would be very challenging. Venus would be a lesson for what Earth could become in a worst case scenario, a superheated, high pressure acid bath. It's literally a high pressure, high temperate acid bath. Definitely not a good place. I think the most that any probe has even lasted on Venus is measured in hours. So that would be a tricky one. Venus is not at all like the goddess. This is not, in no way similar to, to the actual goddess.
We could conceivably go to our Moon, its close and I have nothing against going to the Moon, but I think it's challenging to become multi-planetary on the Moon because it's much smaller than a planet. It's really a very small rock, you know, that's just circling Earth, doesn't have any atmosphere, very limited amounts of water ice that are in sort of permanently shadowed craters, it's not as resource-rich. Then it’s got a 28 day rotational cycle which isn't great for plants. It would be quite tough to make a self-sustaining civilization on the Moon. Plus, if something calamitous happened on Earth, the Moon is very close, so it might affect the Moon too. We're happy to take people the Moon. If somebody wants to go to the Moon, we can definitely do it. But as far as making life multi-planetary, you know, tautologically one must have a second planet and the Moon is lacking in a lot of the key elements one needs for creating a civilization. It's analogous I think to the arctic. The arctic is close to Britain but it kinda sucks over there, and so that's why America is not there and it's where it is. Even though it's a lot harder to cross the Atlantic. From Norway you can practically row to the arctic, in fact I think they did.
Going beyond that you're going to Jupiter. You could potentially do something on the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, but that's way harder than Mars. Those are quite far out much further from the Sun, and a lot harder to get to.
It really leaves us with one option, and that's Mars. There's been a lot of great work by NASA and other organizations in early exploration of Mars, and understanding what Mars is like, where could we land, what's the composition of the atmosphere, where is there water — water ice I should say.
Mars is definitely a fixer-upper of a planet. It's not perfect, but feasible, we could make it work. In fact we now believe that early Mars was a lot like Earth. They're actually remarkably close in a lot of ways. Just to give some comparison between the two planets. Mars is about half again as far from the Sun as Earth. It's got just under half Earth's gravity - so it's a lot closer gravitationally. The day is remarkably close to that of Earth, it's got a rotational period of 24.5 hours - remarkably similar to Earth. By far the closest of any other planet. Still decent sunlight, it's a little cold, but we can warm it up. It is colder than Earth, but it's not super cold, there are times when Mars gets above freezing. The temperature on Mars actually gets above room temperature on Earth on a hot day in the summer. You don't have the same UV protection that you have on Earth or the same cosmic ray protection. On Mars dawn and dusk are blue. The sky is blue at dawn and dusk, and red during the day. It's the opposite of Earth.
It's got a lot of water ice - almost all of Mars has water, bound up in ice form, in the soil. The soil has turned out to be non-toxic, based on probes that we've sent there. You just have an enormous number of resources on Mars. It has a very helpful atmosphere being primarily carbon dioxide with some nitrogen and argon, and a few other trace elements. It’s very helpful that Mars has CO2 and nitrogen and argon, it’s mostly CO2 but that little bit of nitrogen and argon those are like really helpful gases to have in the atmosphere. Mars has a number of trace gases that are pretty helpful. If you got H2O and CO2 you can build hydrocarbons of any kind, you can build plastics, you can build short chain, long chain hydrocarbons.
Plants like to consume CO2 and on net give you oxygen. If you had a greenhouse and some fertilizer, and you just warmed things up and pressurized it a little bit, then you could grow plants on Mars. If you just had a transparent pressurized dome and pump, you could actually grow Earth plants in martian soil. Martian soil is non-toxic so you could actually grow Earth plants in martian soil just by heating it up and pressurizing it with CO2. You need a little fertilizer but Mars actually has 2.7% nitrogen which is also very important for growing plants, it means that you can synthesize fertilizer as well. A transparent dome, a pump, and some fertilizer and you can grow plants on Mars, just by compressing the atmosphere, and the plants convert the CO2 to Oxygen. Mars's carbon dioxide has been there for 4 billion years so it shows you how long carbon dioxide lasts. You could warm Mars up over time with greenhouse gases, kind of the opposite of what we are doing on Earth, so we could export our greenhouse gases. In fact if we could warm Mars up, it would once again have a thick atmosphere and liquid oceans.
It really doesn't seem like there is life on Mars, on the surface at least we don’t see any sign of that. I think if we do find some sign of it, for sure we need to understand what it is, and try to ensure that we don't try to extinguish it, that is important. But I think the reality is that there isn't any life on the surface of Mars. Maybe microbial life deep underground where it is sort of shielded from radiation and from the cold that’s a possibility. In that case I think anything we do on the surface is really not going to have a big impact on the subterranean life.
I think it's very doable to create a self-sustaining Mars base, and then ultimately terraform the planet to make it like Earth so we could just walk around outdoors. Obviously that is sort of a longer term project that may take a few centuries, but it is within the realm of possibility. Eventually you could transform Mars into an Earth-like planet, you’d warm it up, just warm it up. There's the fast way and the slow way. The fast way is drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles. The Sun is a fusion explosion, that's what the Sun is, it's an ongoing fusion explosion. So if you wanted to add energy to Mars, to warm up Mars, the source of almost all energy in the universe is fusion, even fission. Originally it was fusion and that then later resulted in fission. What I have talked about was creating two little Suns, two pulsing Suns above the North and South Pole of Mars. That would warm the poles up enough so that the frozen CO2 would gasify and densify the atmosphere so that the water would also heat up, and you would have more sort of water vapor and CO2 in the Martian atmosphere. Which in that case is good because it ends up warming Mars up. So you get a positive sort of reaction, of a positive cycle of warming on Mars. You want to warm Mars up, you don't want to warm Earth up. The slow way would be to release greenhouse gases like we're doing on Earth. We've got a lot of experience releasing greenhouse gases.
So yeah, it's a pretty good option, in fact it's the only option I think. Mars is really the only place where we can create a sustainable civilization of on the planet scale. We just need to change the bottom line because currently we have 7 billion people on Earth and zero on Mars.
If we can establish a base on Mars that's going to create a huge forcing function for the improvement of space transport technology. And then that could ultimately lead us to go beyond the Solar System. That will then create a forcing function to improve technologies and all sorts of things that we don't really know about today will get invented in the future.
The goal of SpaceX is really to build the transport system. It's like building the Union Pacific Railroad. Once that transport system is built then there's a tremendous opportunity for anyone who wants to go to Mars and create something new or build the foundations of a new planet. Assuming SpaceX is able to transport large numbers of people and goods to Mars, it will be an enormous enabler for entrepreneurial activity on Mars.
It is kind of like when they were building the Union Pacific. A lot of people said, ‘Well, that's a super-dumb idea, there's nobody living in California.” before there was the Union Pacific going across the US to California, there was like hardly any people in California. People thought building the Union Pacific was just crazy because there’s nobody there, so why are we building a railroad to nowhere? Now California is the most populous state in the country. Just as happened in California when the Union Pacific Railroad was completed. I mean, today, it's the U.S. epicenter of technology development and entertainment. It's the biggest state in the nation. You need that transport link, if you can't get there, then none of those opportunities exist. Once you get there the opportunities for entrepreneurs are tremendous. There's going to be so much to do. Starting the first Italian restaurant on Mars, the first Pizza joint, somebody's got to do it. Everything, the entire basic industry from creating the first iron ore refinery, to everything you can imagine, and probably things that are unique to Mars that doesn't even exist on Earth.
Our goal is just to make sure you can get there. That's really where a tremendous amount of entrepreneurship and talent would flourish. We got to effectively get that Union Pacific Railroad there in order to get the entrepreneurs there and create a virtile environment for them. There will be a lot of super exciting things that are hard to predict just like the Union Pacific, nobody would have predicted Silicon Valley or Hollywood, or that California would be the most populous state in the country. They would be like ‘that sounds crazy.’ It's like who wants to sort of be among the founding members of a new planet and, build everything from iron refineries to the first pizza joint, and things on Mars that people can't even imagine today that might be unique or would be unique to Mars. You know, we will want them all.
It would be quite fun because you have gravity which is about 37% that of Earth, so you'd be able to lift heavy things, and bound around, and have a lot of fun. I think you'd probably be working on building infrastructure on Mars, and exploring, and seeing all the interesting things. We need to establish cities on Mars, that would require sort of domes and that kind of thing, that's the only way to go I think. Lots of exploring, like Valles Marineris makes the Grand Canyon look tiny, it's kind of cool, go down that and check it out. Olympus Mons, it's kind of a shallow gradient but it's the tallest mountain in the Solar System. Exploring a new planet I think would be pretty interesting, and then building the infrastructure necessary to make life self-sustaining on Mars.
There's no real work going on now in terms of designing Mars habitats. I think we need to focus our energies on designing the Mars spaceship first, and then that would effectively be the first habitat. We have rovers on Mars already, so I think we'll see more robots on Mars. My guess is when we get there the technology required to live there is not a really big challenge. In the beginning kind of live in glass domes but over time we would terraform Mars like Earth.
Mars actually has a huge amount of water in water ice, so I don’t think we’ll really suffer a water shortage on Mars. Once you get to Mars I think there will be some drilling activity in particularly to find out if you can get to underground lakes to find liquid water, like sort of water that is heated by Mars central core. That would make it a lot easier to develop propellant on Mars.
Critical to any Mars colonization is the ability to generate fuel on Mars. You need to generate methane on Mars. Which you can do because you know Mars has a CO2 atmosphere, and there is a lot of frozen H2O around, there's a lot of water buried in the soil that you can get to. So you get your CH4 and your 02, and then just figuring out how to get all the bits of efficiency right for creating, say, methane and oxygen on Mars. Having that propellant plant on Mars would be critical to a Mars colony. Rockets do burn hydrocarbons but they can use hydrogen as well. The most likely Mars architecture that I think makes sense is a methane oxygen system, because methane is the lowest cost source fuel on Earth. It'd be an automated propellant depot and there is some question as to, what do you do for power generation on Mars?
Power generation on Mars I think is an interesting problem. The main thing about Mars is actually going to be energy. Do you have a nuclear reactor? then you've got to carry the nuclear fuel there, and reactors are fairly heavy. Do you do some lightweight solar power system? like, maybe big inflatable solar arrays or something like that. If you have energy there’s plenty of water because there’s massive amounts of ice, so it’s really just about getting huge numbers of solar panels out there and potentially doing geothermal energy, and you know ultimately I think, assuming the public is receptive, there might be nuclear. I think certainly if you’d built nuclear on Mars or to whether you transport nuclear to Mars would be kind of up to the public to decide. I think solar energy is probably fairly significant for Mars, and what's going to be quite important is having a very lightweight solar system, both volumetrically and gravimetrically dense. Actually, we're sort of playing with different concepts like, you know that thing, like that party thing where you inflate it and it rolls out? one of the solar concepts is to have like a big roll that you just basically inflate and it rolls out with really thin solar panels on it. It’s going to be pretty important because really you either got to do that or nuclear, and nuclear has its challenges, but for solar it's pretty straight forward. I think solar is very important to the future exploration of Mars for sure.
I do think getting good at digging tunnels could be really helpful for Mars. It would be different optimization for a Mars boring machine versus a Earth boring machine. But for sure there’s going to be a lot of ice-mining on Mars, and mining in general to get raw materials, and then along the way building underground habitats where you get good radiation shielding. You could build an entire city if you wanted to. People will still go to the surface from time to time, but you can build a tremendous amount underground with the right boring technology on Mars. So I do think there is some overlap in that technology department arena.
For Hyperloop on Mars you basically just need a track, on Earth the air density is quite high but on Mars it's 1% of Earth's atmospheric density. So probably you might be able to just have a road honestly, you’d go pretty fast. It would obviously have to be electric because there's no oxygen. You could have really fast electric cars, or trains or things like electric aircraft.
I think it's quite likely that we'd want to bio-engineer new organisms that are better suited to living on Mars. Humanity's kinda done that over time by selective breeding - You know, cows didn't evolve in the wild - but that's a very slow process that requires hundreds of generations, whereas I think with actual bio-engineering you could make that happen a lot faster and maybe with more precision. Ideally, long term - although this is a tricky subject - you'd want to write genetics. Meaning, you'd want to create synthetics organisms. Not necessarily completely but, you know, start with some base and than modify stuff.
I actually think that the technology required to live on Mars is not that difficult. Getting there is really difficult. It's like hundreds of millions of miles to get to a place that kind a looks like a cold version of Arizona with not quite as much water.
I think the first journey to Mars is going to be really very dangerous. Going to Mars is not for the faint of heart, and is risky, and dangerous, and uncomfortable, and you might die, now do you want to go? for a lot of people the answer is going to be “Hell No!” and for some it’s going to be “Hell Yes!” if safety is your top goal, I would not go to Mars. The risk of fatality will be high, there’s just no way around it, so I would not suggest sending children. It would be basically are you prepared to die? then if that's okay, then you know, you're a candidate for going.
I think it’s pretty important to give people the option of returning. The number of people who would be willing to move to Mars is much greater if they know they have the option of returning, even if they never actually return. I mean, most of the people who went to the original English colonies in North America they never returned to Europe even once, some did. Knowing that if you don’t like it there that you can come back I think it makes a big difference in people’s willingness to go there in the first place. In any case we need the space ship back, so it’s coming you can jump on board or not, it’s cool, you get a free return trip, if you want.
When there's enough people who can do that combined with the people who actually want to do that. That's the fundamental thing needed for growing a colony on Mars. Kind of like the way it was with the English colonies in America. When it became affordable for people to sell all their stuff in England and move to America it grew really fast.
I do think we value discovery, and new things, and learning about the universe. There was quite a bit attention paid to the discovery of water flowing on Mars. The truth is right now on Earth you can basically go anywhere in 24 hours. I mean anywhere, you could fly over the Antarctic pole and parachute out in 24 hours from now if you want. You can parachute on the mount Everest from the right plane. You can go to the bottom of the ocean. Earth from a physical standpoint you can go anywhere, there is no real physical frontier on Earth anymore. Space is that frontier. I think this is really something that appeals to anybody with a exploratory spirit. If you are a explorer, if you want to be on the frontier, and push the envelope, and be where things are super exciting even if it's dangerous, that's really who we are appealing to.
We want to have a future ultimately where humanity is out they're exploring the stars, and the things that we read about in science fiction books and see in movies becomes true. We don't want that to always be a fiction of the future.
You really want to create the dream of Mars in peoples minds and have it be like it's the new frontier. ‘The Martian’ was good, I thought it was pretty excellent, certainly one of the most realistic books on Mars that I've read. There were a few things, like the wind force on Mars is not really that high, it's not going to knock you over or anything, it’s high velocity but low force. But overall I thought it was pretty cool, and it's made into a movie and everything. I'm a little worried that it might not make people too keen on going to Mars, it’s like, 'This just looks really hard.' I think we need a show about how Mars is also more like the Wild West, and you got the gun slingers, and like the cool cowboys, and that kind of thing. Make it as exciting, fun and desirable as possible. I think this is where the entertainment industry can play a huge role in putting that dream in peoples heads what it would be like.
The key thing is to establish a base on Mars. As soon as you have that base of ours then there is a very powerful forcing function to improve space transportation technologies, and all sorts of things that we don't really know about today. I mean right now they're just isn't that forcing function because all we do is very local stuff in Earth orbit. You need that forcing function, just like before there was a need to cross the Atlantic there wasn't a forcing function to improve ships. Once the United States was there, then there was a big incentive to improve shipping technology across the Atlantic. If ships had not been reusable in the days of American colonization, the United States would not exist. I think it's a pivotal step on the way to establishing a self-sustaining civilization on Mars. If we don't do that I just don't think we'll be able to afford it, because it's a difference between something costing half a percentage each year of GDP and all of GDP.
You hear all these rebuttals like; aren’t there all these problems on Earth that we need to deal with and shouldn't we focus on that? and the answer is yes, our primary focus should be the problems on Earth, but I think that there should be some small amount that's given over to the establishment of a colony on Mars and making life multi-planetary. Obviously it can't be all of the GDP, we'd get a lot of complaints about that, but half a percent of GDP or maybe quarter a percent of GDP, okay that's manageable. I think most people would agree, even if they don't intend to go themselves, that if we're spending something between a quarter to a half a percent of GDP on establishing a self-sustaining civilization on another planet is probably worth doing. It's sort of a life insurance policy for Life collectively, and that seems like a reasonable insurance premium. Plus it would be a fun adventure to watch even if you don't participate, just as when people went to the Moon only a few people actually went to the Moon, but in a sense we all went there vicariously. I think most people would say that was a good thing. When people look back and say what were the good things that occurred in the 20th century, that would have to be right near the top of the list. So I think there's value, even if someone doesn't go themselves.
I would definitely like to go into orbit and visit the Space Station, and then ultimately go to Mars. I got to make sure that if something goes wrong on the flight and I die that there is a good succession plan, and that the mission of the company continues, and that it somehow doesn't get taken over by investors who just want to maximize the profit of the company and not go to Mars, that would be my biggest fear in that situation.
Funding, we've thought about funding sources. So we could steal underpants, launch satellites, send cargo to Space Station, Kickstarter of course — followed by profit. Obviously it's going to be a challenge to fund this whole endeavor. We do expect to generate pretty decent net cash flow from launching lots of satellites, and servicing the Space Station for NASA, transferring cargo to and from the Space Station. And then I know that there's a lot of people in the private sector who are interested in helping fund a base on Mars. Then perhaps there’ll be interest on the government sector side to also do that. Ultimately this is going to be a huge public-private partnership, and I think that's how the United States was established, and many other countries around the world, as a public-private partnership.
I think it’s fine if countries get together to form teams, but I think it's actually probably better if there are at least two or three country coalitions going to Mars in a friendly way, and competing to see who can make the most progress. I think friendly competition is a good thing. If you look at say the Olympics, it would be pretty boring if everyone just linked arms and crossed the finishing line at the same time. Really this is less about, like, you know, who goes there first, the thing that really matters is making a self-sustaining civilization on Mars as fast as possible.
There’s certainly not gonna be a resource-based conflict due to scarcity of resource on Mars. It’s open territory on Mars, so I don't think there’s gonna be any kind of scarcity. There’s like a lot of land on Mars, and not many people, and if there are people they are way cleverer than us because they are hiding well.
Sometimes people say, well, what is the business model for Mars? and sometimes they think, well, can you mine Mars and bring things back. That is not a realistic business model for Mars because it's always going to be far cheaper to mine things on Earth than Mars. I think any natural resource extraction on Mars would be - the output would be for Mars. It definitely wouldn't make sense to transport Mars stuff 200 million miles back to Earth. Honestly, if you had like crack-cocaine on Mars, in like prepackaged pallets, it still wouldn't make sense to transport it back here. Maybe good times for the Martians, but not back here. Resources would be for a colony to use.
What I want SpaceX to keep doing is working on the technologies necessary. And while I do think there’s likely to be some economic payoff by transporting large numbers of people and cargo to Mars, it requires a bit of long-term thinking. That maybe goes beyond the quarterly cycle of Wall Street, that’s for sure. Some people on Wall Street will think that’s just crazy, and what I should actually just do is milk the government and various commercial companies, and try to charge them as high as possible, which we will not do. I want to make sure that I can ignore such things, which I can only do if I’m the controlling shareholder. Right now we're just trying to make as much progress as we can with the resources that we have available, and just sort of keep moving the ball forward, and hopefully I think, as we show that this is possible, that this dream is real, not just a dream — it's something that can be made real — I think the support will snowball over time.
What I really want to try to achieve here is to make Mars seem possible, make it seem as though it's something that we can do in our lifetimes — and that you can go, and there really is a way that anyone can go if they wanted to. I think that's really the important thing. I should say also that the main reason I’m personally accumulating assets is in order to fund this. I really don't have any other motivation for personally accumulating assets, except to be able to make the biggest contribution I can to making life multi-planetary. To have a future ultimately where humanity is out they're exploring the stars, we're a spacefaring civilization, and the things that we read about in science fiction books and see in movies becomes true. We don't want that to always be a fiction of the future. If we don't improve space technology every year we are never going to get there. And so the goal of SpaceX is to make as much improvement as possible. And hopefully we will see people land on Mars in our lifetime.
At this point I'm certain there is a way, I'm certain that success is one of possible outcomes for establishing a growing Mars colony. I'm certain that that is possible. Whereas until maybe a few years ago, I was not sure that success was even one of the possible outcomes. Of course, there's a long way between possible and making it real, but I believe it is possible. Mars is the next natural step. In fact it's the only planet we really have a shot at establishing a self-sustaining city on. So we need to go from these early exploration missions to actually building a city. That’s I guess my ultimate dream. I think once we do establish such a city there will be a strong forcing function for the improvement of spaceflight technology that will then enable us to establish colonies elsewhere in the Solar System, and ultimately extend beyond our Solar System.