“I feel fairly confident, in about six years from now,” SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk answered when asked to give a realistic timeline of when humans could travel to Mars. “If we get lucky, maybe four years. We want to try to send an uncrewed vehicle to Mars in two years.” Musk reiterated that he wanted to develop technologies that make it possible for humans to make life multi-planetary.
Musk was in Berlin, Germany, to receive the Axel Springer Award on 1 December. Named after one of the largest media companies in Germany, the Axel Springer Award is in its fifth year. Previous recipients of the award include US scientist and author of 'Surveillance Capitalism' Shoshana Zuboff (2019), Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (2018), World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee (2017) and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (2016). Looking at the relatively short list of winners, it almost feels like the award recognises not just Big Tech icons but also those who are critical of policies adopted by these very same Big Tech companies.
As part of the award ceremony, Musk was in conversation with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Doepfner and spoke at length about his ambitions to put humans on Mars.
“I am optimistic about the future on Earth, but it is important to have life insurance for humanity,” said Musk, calling his Mars ambition not a Plan B for humanity but just something exciting and inspiring for society to look forward to. Musk’s SpaceX has demonstrated its excellence when it comes to its space ambitions. After it sent two astronauts to the International Space Station, earlier this year, NASA has now certified SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon human spaceflight system for crew missions to and from the ISS.
Musk seemed to be in a mood to give timelines to some of his projects. Travel to Mars - in six years; Fully autonomous cars - in ten years; Electric vehicles - 70-80 percent of all cars would be electrified in ten years, and so on.
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