Robert Pratten Excitement around a manned mission to Mars has been building over recent years and now it seems to have reached fever pitch! Or is it just in our household? 🙂
Just this week CNet reports on Elon Musk’s tweets that he wants to put a million people on Mars by 2050. We have every reason to believe that it’s not just an idle boast. In this Cato Institute podcast on the case for space exploration, Robert Zubrin says that Musk’s Falcon Heavy rocket has confounded the industry by creating a heavy lift reusable rocket in 6 years at a cost of less than $1bn when the acknowledged experts believed it would take 12 years and $36bn.
This video shows a recent Space X test launch to demonstrate the safe return of astronauts in their Dragon capsule should something go wrong at launch.
Indeed Musk features prominently in this excellent exhibition at the Design Museum in London where visitors can touch, see and even smell what life might be like on Mars. I was fascinated by the collaborating robots designed to dig, haul and construct habitation from martian soil.
Here’s my wife Helen at the Design Museum getting used to her new home on Mars…
And this is the Star Wars-inspired home capsule I’m building for my nephew’s 7 year old. It’s still a work in progress but hoping for take-off in the next week or so!
