Hong Kong – Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, one of the enterprises in the commercial space industry, said this week during the StartmeupHK Festival in Hong Kong that he personally wants to visit space within the next five years and thinks that his company will send somebody to Mars by 2025.
The 44-year-old billionaire said he will reveal the detailed plan for sending people to Mars in September at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico.
Musk said space travel to Mars is part of a larger vision of one day establishing a city on the Red Planet, partly to ensure the survival of the human race but also because it would be an incredible and exciting adventure.
“It’s really a fundamental decision we need to make as a civilization. What kind of future do we want? Do we want one where we are forever confined to one planet until some eventual extinction event however far into the future that might occur or do we want to be a multi planet species and ultimately be out there among the stars, among many planets and many star systems,” he said.
Musk also said he hopes to travel to the International Space Station in four or five years. He said he is not quite ready yet for the experience. He basically has just taken some parabolic flights, which simulate weightlessness for about 20 seconds at a time. Even though he added that he didn’t think it’s that hard, you float around.
The visionary CEO did not just introduce the idea of populating the red planet. He also mentioned the prospects for creating brain-computer interfaces that would let you store and retrieve images and other information directly from implants in your head. Claiming that we would never forget anything and we wouldn’t need to photograph anything.
Source: NBC News