Elon Musk Says It's Currently Too Expensive for Self-Sustaining City on Mars

If you were hoping to vacation to Mars any time soon, you might not want to get too excited. [...]

By Adam Barnhardt

If you were hoping to vacation to Mars any time soon, you might not want to get too excited. SpaceX founder and space pioneer Elon Musk says it's currently far too expensive to get a self-sustaining city built on the red planet. Should a city come to fruition at some point, Musk says, it will require reusable rockets to be the norm in the industry. Five years ago this weekend, SpaceX was the first company to successfully launch a rocket and have it return safely to Earth. As Musk says, the cost of reusable rockets is currently over 1,000-percent of what it should be to make the Mars city even remotely possible to build.

Responding to a tweet of the aforementioned rocket launch, Musk celebrated the occasion, before suddenly shutting down any talks of getting to Mars anytime soon. "5 years ago," the entrepreneur tweeted. "We need to accelerate progress towards fully reusable rockets. Cost per ton to orbit needs to improve by >1000% from where Falcon is today for there to be a self-sustaining city on Mars."

Musk, the entrepreneur behind massively popular companies like Tesla, told Bloomberg Businessweek earlier this month that all of his companies are struggling during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

"It's pretty intense days," Musk said earlier this month. "SpaceX has been working this entire time because we have a national security exemption. We've had 8,000 people working full time through the whole pandemic. We've had zero serious illnesses or deaths despite working in L.A., Washington, Texas and Florida."

The at-times controversial figure head has been one of the leading voices on settling on Mars one day. Within the past year, Musk has unveiled a plan in which he'd blast Mars with whatever nukes he could get his hands on in an attempt to terraform the planet. Those comments are now back in the news this week after a leading Russian scientist suggested on Twitter this week the eccentric billionaire would need upwards of 10,000 nuclear warheads to achieve the affect he's looking for.

Musk's response to the news? "No problem," he tweeted back at the report.

Cover photo by Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

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