One-Way Ticket for a Million: Elon Musk on Mars Colonization

They will have to dismantle their spacecraft for valuable raw materials.

The founder of SpaceX Elon Musk confirmed that the first people to travel to Mars will never return to Earth. He shared this during a presentation at SpaceX's Texas base in Boca Chica. There, the billionaire reiterated that his company has long been developing a plan to send the first million people to Mars.

According to Musk, the foundation of settling the Red Planet will be the use of Starship spacecraft. Moreover, he does not plan to allow for the possibility of returning the first vehicles sent to Mars.

Elon Musk hopes that with the help of Starship, humanity will eventually become a multi-planetary species. This can be said when a colony of people on Mars can sustain itself without support from Earth. For this, about a million people will be needed, as well as several million tons of cargo that must be delivered in advance to the Red Planet.

The creator of SpaceX assigns a special role in this mission to his Starship, which is undergoing flight tests. Three attempts to launch the rocket in conjunction with the first stage, Super Heavy, have already been made. During the last attempt, almost all stages of the flight proceeded normally, but the spacecraft disintegrated during re-entry into the dense layers of the atmosphere. Musk hopes that in the fourth attempt, scheduled for early May, this can be avoided.

After a couple of successful landings, SpaceX will attempt to recover Starship for a soft landing on the pad. The Super Heavy booster will first be aimed to land on a platform in the Gulf of Mexico, and then on a special service tower.