Billionaire Entrepreneur Wants to Put Man on Mars
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Digital Vision/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — As the Mars rover Curiosity, a $2.5 billion robot the size of a Mini Cooper, touched down last night, one billionaire was already planning the next logical step — sending humans there.
“I’m confident at this point that it can be done,” Elon Musk told ABC’s Nightline in an interview at SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles. “I think we’ll be able to send, probably, the first people to Mars in roughly 12 to 15 years. That’s my estimate.”
Musk, who made his billions as an Internet entrepreneur, wants to bring Silicon Valley ingenuity to a space exploration process that, until recently, has been something only governments tried to tackle.
He entered the space race in 2010 with his company’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule, reusable spacecraft built with the goal of taking astronauts into space and returning them safely to Earth.
Musk said he is aware he has competitors in this new space race — one reason why SpaceX does not patent any of the top-secret technology it creates.
“The rockets we’re building right now could certainly send probes to Mars, like the Mars rovers and that kind of thing,” he said. “But the rockets we hope to build in the future are the ones that could take people and cargo to Mars and establish a Martian base.”
And he has big plans for Mars — not just taking people there, but making it possible for people to thrive there and even establish businesses.
“Mars is the only place in the solar system where it’s possible for life to become multi-planetarian,” Musk said. “We could make Mars like Earth…it’s more than our life raft, it’s like backing up the biosphere.”
One of the biggest challenges of colonizing the red planet is making the trip affordable for the average American, he said, which is “extremely difficult.”
While Musk’s outer space ambitions may sound bold, he has a track record. After leaving his native South Africa at 17, he went into online commerce with his brother. One of his companies is known today as PayPal. That company brought him his first billion dollars, which he poured into his electric car company, Tesla, and an energy services company Solar City, two companies now at the cutting edge of renewable energy.
Watch the full story on ABC’s Nightline tonight at 11:35 p.m. ET/PT
Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio