Elon Musk Talks About Traveling To Mars And How To Make It Self Sustaining – Video

In an hour-long speech titled “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species” at the International Astronautical Congress here Tuesday he said his goal was to “make Mars seem possible. To make it seem like it’s something we can do in our lifetimes. That you can go.”

The design of the Mars rocket shows that it is a towering 400-feet tall, far more powerful than the Saturn V that took the Apollo astronauts to the moon. He acknowledged the immense, if quixotic, challenge he was undertaking would begin not just with creating a spacecraft that could keep dozens of humans alive for extended periods but with producing rocket fuel from the resources on Mars. And he acknowledged the difficulties of lowering the cost of the flights from $10 billion a person to $200,000 or less, in part by reusing rockets to fly repeat missions ferrying lots of people.