Elon Musk? More like Elon MUST get to us Mars. SpaceX is an American aerospace manufacturer and space transport services headed by Elon Musk, investor, engineer, and inventor. Musk’s goals are to “change the world and humanity,” and hopefully to improve the cost and reliability of access to space, to find easier ways of commercializing space transportation, and to send humans to Mars within the time-span of around ten to twenty years.

One of SpaceX’s goals is to reduce the cost of sending materials and supplies into space. To be able to reduce the cost, SpaceX must improve upon the designs of their rockets “development of a heavy lift product and even a super-heavy, if there is customer demand.” Musk believes, “$500 per pound ($1,100/kg) or less is very achievable.” Reducing the cost of added weight to shuttles is one of the first steps in the colonization of Mars, making the endeavor that much easier; a skewed cost will also allow in the future for the private companies to commercialize the use of shuttles – people look to sight see in space, or for those who see Mars as a tourist destination. 

The first people to set foot on Mars was first suggested by NASA to occur by the year 2030. With both SpaceX and NASA working on the mission to Mars, not to mention other countries’ space programs, the reality of human civilization reaching and settling Mars within the coming years seems very likely. “NASA took a significant step Friday toward expanding research opportunities aboard International Space Station with its first mission order from Hawthorne, California based-company SpaceX to launch astronauts from U.S. soil.”

SpaceX comes ever closer to accomplishing their goals of improving the cost of access to space, commercializing and making the use of rockets more and more common like airplanes, and starting the process of colonizing of Mars. In the meantime, we Earthlings sit idly by – living our lives, turning the gears of our civilization; a new manifest destiny is coming closer to fruition: our goal of spreading our civilization amongst the solar system, and maybe even one day, we will walk within the lights of distant stars, cementing our legacy in the cosmos.