Elon Musk spoke at the US Air Force Space Pitch Day on Tuesday; he speculated that Starship, SpaceX’s 100-passenger reusable rocket design, will cost $2 million to launch.
In a thread of tweets, Elon laid out a few more figures about how many rockets will have to bring the necessary amount of cargo to properly set up base on Mars.
Business Insider reported that more than a thousand ships will be needed to create a sustainable Mars city. As the planets align only once every two years. This led him to conclude it would take 20 years to transport one million tons of cargo which would “hopefully” allow for building a self-sustaining Mars base.
According to Elon, that would mean a total of $2 billion spent on launching the rockets, although over 20 years the cost could fluctuate.
The founder of Tesla has a history of making alarming predictions about his plans to colonize Mars, the theory has little scientific grounding, however. As per the research found there is unlikely to be enough CO2 in Mars’ icecaps to engineer the desired greenhouse effect and, even if there were, Mars’ atmosphere is constantly leaking into deep space so the gas would gradually disappear.
