Just watched Elon Musk’s audacious and inspiring Mars colonisation announcement

I have just finished watching Elon Musk’s latest SpaceX announcement and I’m absolutely, utterly blown away!

At the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara Elon Musk unveiled SpaceX’s Interplanetary Transport System, which will combine the most powerful rocket ever built with a spaceship designed to carry at least 100 people to Mars per flight. The plan is for humanity establish a permanent, self-sustaining colony on Mars within the next 50 to 100 years.

What I really want to do here is to make Mars seem possible — make it seem as though it’s something that we could do in our lifetimes, and that you can go,” Musk said. There won’t be just one ship making the journey. When the ITS is fully up and running, 1,000 or more of the ships will head to Mars every 26 months.

Musk is aiming to create a situation where the average middle class citizen of a developed nation, someone who might hope to owning a house in a country such as the USA for example, to *aspire to emigrate to Mars in his or her lifetime. *That is breathtaking!

The objective is to become a spacefaring civilization and a multiplanet species,” Musk said, adding that doing so will make humanity far less susceptible to extinction.

Personally, I find this extraordinarily uplifting. I’m disappointed that most of our mainstream media paid it little attention or took a cynical view of the “eccentric” Musk.

Go SpaceX!