Want to go to Mars? Here's what it looks like there
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is looking to Red Planet to save humanity
Elon Musk's 10-year plan is to make humans 'multiplanetary.'
The SpaceX chief executive laid his Mars ambitions bare in a speech at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Tuesday, saying he plans to make travel to the Red Planet "fairly routine" within the next decade.
The nearly two-hour-long address, which was posted on YouTube, points to Mars as humanity's best chance of survival in the event of a doomsday scenario. It gets into the nitty-gritty of sending 100 or more people to Mars at a time.
Mars is so hot right now.
Musk's announcement follows Mars buzz generated by the Phoenix lander and Curiosity rover, not to mention Matt Damon's movie The Martian. The latter prompted NASA to release this picture from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter of the Acidalia Planitia region, where the film's fictional characters touched down.
Below that is an approximately 30-metre diameter impact crater on the Martian surface taken from orbit in 2013.
SpaceX plans to send unmanned spacecraft to Mars starting in 2018.
Musk already has plans to begin sending unmanned Dragon spacecraft to Mars biennially starting in 2018 — to show potential investors that the "dream is real" — and, in the meantime, has given Mars dreamers a look at what space travel might look like in this concept video.
Here are some actual pictures of the Martian surface from NASA.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched in 2005 and has been beaming photos home since 2006. This one, of the Ophir Chasma on the northern end of the planet's vast canyon system known as the Vallles Marineris, was taken in 2015.
This shot from the orbiter taken in 2014 shows an area of active sand dunes called the Nili Patera. Shots like this one help NASA track the Martian wind and reveal clues as to the planet's seasons.
And this one, taken by the orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera in 2011, shows channels ranging from one to 10 metres in width in an area known as the Hellas impact basin.
The rovers were NASA's first Mars stars.
In a turn of marketing genius the space agency personified their Martian rovers on Twitter with Phoenix even becoming one of the network's most popular accounts in 2008. Curiosity, which landed in 2012, has over 3.4 million follows and shares pictures like this one of a sedimentary rock outcrop (further proof of water on Mars) in its feed.
This one from 2012 was taken at the base of Mars's Mount Sharp by Curiosity and was used to help with terrain analysis.
Opportunity rover, which landed in 2004 and remains active to this day, took this shot of a basketball-sized iron and nickel meteorite found on the Martian surface. Its the first meteorite of any type ever identified on another planet.
