Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk says rocket technology will “enable anyone” to move to Mars and beyond.
And gas-powered cars will be relics, “like steam engines,” he says.
This according to a recent series of tweets from the Tesla and SpaceX boss.
On Friday, SpaceX launched and landed the Falcon 9 Block 5, the newest version of the company’s reusable rocket.
“I still remember when … reusability was in fact impossible, or more precisely, that the amount of extra fuel and equipment would render net payload reduced to zero. Impossible is a funny word,” tweeted a user after the SpaceX success. Until recently, rockets were used once and then discarded. Companies like SpaceX and Amazon billionaire boss Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin can now launch and re-land rockets to save time and money.
“Yeah, I heard this so many times,” Musk tweeted in response. “In the future, it will seem bizarre that we used to crash rockets into the ocean instead of reusing them.”
Musk says the next generation of SpaceX rocket, the “BFR,” will one day open the door for space colonizations, enabling “anyone to move to [the] moon, Mars & eventually outer planets.”
Musk is already actively and publicly planning for enabling life on Mars.
In 2017, Musk said he aimed to send the first rocket to Mars by 2022 with cargo but no people. The billionaire said he hoped to transport human passengers to Mars by 2024.
And space is not the only industry where Musk’s future-forward visionary mindset is evident.
He sees a world where “gasoline cars will be like steam engines,” he says, “quaint, but not something you’d actually use to get around.”
Of course, as the founder and CEO of Tesla, it’s little surprise that Musk sees a future where the biggest rival to electric cars is on the path toward extinction.
Musk says he is driven by a desire to be able to feel optimistic about the future.
“The thing that drives me is that I want to be able to think about the future and feel good about that,” said Musk, speaking to the National Governors Association in 2017.
“We are doing what we can to have the future be as good as possible, to be inspired by what is likely to happen and to look forward to the next day.”
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