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The SpaceX boss has envisioned people staying on the red planet in a self-sustaining city in 20 years

Almost buried beneath a recent avalanche of rightwing invective posted by Elon Musk on the platform he owns, X, was one eye-popping statement that made space watchers sit up and take notice: an assertion that humans could land on Mars within four years and be living there in a self-sustaining city in 20.

 

It seemed a fanciful boast, even by the standards of the SpaceX founder and world’s richest man, who transformed the logistics and cost of shorter-duration, near-to-Earth orbit space travel with his fleet of reusable Falcon rockets. The US government space agency, Nasa, which is collaborating with SpaceX over knowledge and technology to get astronauts to the red planet, believes a first crewed landing by 2040 would be “audacious”.

Neither was it the first time the enigmatic billionaire has floated such a plan. In 2016 he said he believed those first crewed launches to Mars could take place within six years, even though a heavy rocket to fly them was still at the concept stage.

Yet while many might see Musk’s latest proclamation as another example of his braggadocio, following stories he wanted to help populate an extraterrestrial civilization with his own sperm, and have it driving around the Martian surface in Tesla’s troubled Cybertrucks, some analysts see a sense of purpose.

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