<p>SpaceX CEO Elon Musk today unveiled his plans for establishing a human colony on Mars, using a massive rocket and a fleet of spaceships to achieve a self-sustaining population on the Red Planet this century.<br /><br /></p>.<p>Speaking at the International Astronautical Congress in the western Mexican city of Guadalajara, Musk showed a futuristic video depicting his ideas for an interplanetary transport system based on re-usable rockets, a propellant farm on Mars and 1,000 spaceships on orbit, carrying about 100 people each.<br /><br />The spacecraft would have a restaurant, cabins, zero-gravity games and movies."It has to be fun or exciting. It can't feel cramped or boring," he said.<br /><br />The first flight would be expensive but the aim is "making this affordable to almost anyone who wants to go," by dropping the price of a ticket over time to USD 100,000, Musk said.<br /><br />Millions of tons of cargo would also need to blast off aboard a powerful rocket, which he described as a "scaled-up version of the Falcon 9 booster," the company's current rocket system that can land vertically.<br /><br />Reducing cost would be another key hurdle to establishing a human civilisation on Mars, he said before an overflow crowd at an expo center with a few thousand seats.<br /><br />"We aim to improve the cost per ton to Mars by five million per cent," Musk said."You can't create a self-sustaining civilisation on Mars if the ticket price is USD 10 billion per person."<br /><br />SpaceX has said it plans to send an unmanned Dragon cargo capsule to Mars as early as 2018, paving the way for a human mission that would leave Earth in 2024 and arrive on the Red Planet the following year.</p>
<p>SpaceX CEO Elon Musk today unveiled his plans for establishing a human colony on Mars, using a massive rocket and a fleet of spaceships to achieve a self-sustaining population on the Red Planet this century.<br /><br /></p>.<p>Speaking at the International Astronautical Congress in the western Mexican city of Guadalajara, Musk showed a futuristic video depicting his ideas for an interplanetary transport system based on re-usable rockets, a propellant farm on Mars and 1,000 spaceships on orbit, carrying about 100 people each.<br /><br />The spacecraft would have a restaurant, cabins, zero-gravity games and movies."It has to be fun or exciting. It can't feel cramped or boring," he said.<br /><br />The first flight would be expensive but the aim is "making this affordable to almost anyone who wants to go," by dropping the price of a ticket over time to USD 100,000, Musk said.<br /><br />Millions of tons of cargo would also need to blast off aboard a powerful rocket, which he described as a "scaled-up version of the Falcon 9 booster," the company's current rocket system that can land vertically.<br /><br />Reducing cost would be another key hurdle to establishing a human civilisation on Mars, he said before an overflow crowd at an expo center with a few thousand seats.<br /><br />"We aim to improve the cost per ton to Mars by five million per cent," Musk said."You can't create a self-sustaining civilisation on Mars if the ticket price is USD 10 billion per person."<br /><br />SpaceX has said it plans to send an unmanned Dragon cargo capsule to Mars as early as 2018, paving the way for a human mission that would leave Earth in 2024 and arrive on the Red Planet the following year.</p>