Billionaire Elon Musk is convinced that life on Earth for humans will some time come to an end from either a disease epidemic resulting from a large conventional war, or some other natural catastrophe.
He told Forbes Magazine "From the perspective of ensuring the survival of humanity, the most powerful thing we can do is, establish a second, self sustaining civilisation outside of Earth, and the only place thats really feasable is Mars"
Make no mistake Elon Musk, at 35 years old, is no fruitcake, he is one of the biggest shareholders of eBay, having sold them his company PayPal. Before that he sold, Zip2 to Compaq Computers.
He has convinced NASA that we must do something dramatic to reduce the cost of getting into space. "If we can get the cost low, we can extend life to another Planet"
He is serious about his ambitions in space. To date he has sunk $100m of his personal wealth into 'Space Exploration Technologies' which produced the SpaceX space shuttle, which he privately funded.
Now his ambitions have taken a giant leap forward with a decision by NASA to award contracts worth $485m for his SpaceX shuttle to service the International Space Station.
NASA's contract for 'Commercial Orbital Transportation Services' will be shared by SpaceX, and Kistler Aerospace Corp.
An extraordinary aspect of NASA's decision is that neither winning contractor has yet succesfully sent a craft into orbit, nor achieved the complicated manouever of docking with the Space station.
Musk said "I am too young to retire, besides, in the darkest corners of the cosmos, there are dangerous aliens to be found lurking in the form of cost-concious accountants", Commercial launchings chip in at about $5000-$10000 per lb. But Musk reckons his SpaceX rockets can do the same for $2000 per lb of payload.
The prize is a market worth $billions. Americas two big rocket makers Lockheed Martin, and Boeing have been priced out by Russia, France, Ukraine and now China.
Elon Musk is not alone, with him are Paul Allen co-founder of Microsoft. also Burt Rutan, a brilliant engineer, who won the $10m Ansari X prize in 2004. Again there is Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic UK, and Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, with his Blue Origin, sub orbital rocket. Also John Carmack, developer of Quake and Doom computer games, who has founded 'Armadillo Aerospace' near Dallas.
Musk's latest greatly updated SpaceX shuttle is due to launch from the Pacific Island Atoll of Kwajalein this December. It will be carrying two special NASA hardware payloads.
***Thoughts
Seems the money is there. But "Beam me up Musky"
I'm not sure
