SpaceX founder Elon Musk is known for his ambitious projects with his goal to colonise Mars being the most prominent one. The tech billionaire has, on various occasions, talked about taking humans to the Red Planet saying that it has a "great potential". He once even proposed the idea of becoming a "multi-planetary species" by building a city on Mars.
In the latest from Mr Musk on his Mars obsession, he has envisioned the day when a rocket successfully lands on the Martian surface. He shared a picture of a spacecraft on Twitter with the caption, "This will be Mars one day."
The rocket seen in the photo is SpaceX's Starship project, a reusable rocket system that the company is currently working on. SpaceX recently conducted a static engine fire test of a Starship booster at its Starbase site in South Texas, US. According to SpaceX, the rocket system has been designed to "carry both crew and cargo on long-duration interplanetary flights, and help humanity return to the Moon, and travel to Mars and beyond."
Elon Musk has not just imagined the possibility of colonising Mars but seems pretty confident about it. In a recent tweet, he wrote that "Mars may be a fixer upper of a planet, but it has a great potential!"
Responding to this, a user asked him about the estimated timeframe for humans to create a civilization on Mars. He asked, "Elon, What do you think is the estimated timeframe for creating a self-sustaining civilization on Mars? 20 years? Self-sustaining meaning not relying/dependant on Earth for supplies.”
Replying to the user, Elon Musk said that it would take two to three decades from the first human landing on Mars to set up a colony on the planet. "20 to 30 years from first human landing if launch rate growth is exponential," Mr Musk wrote.
