preview

The Benefits Of A Colony On Mars

Decent Essays

A colony on Mars is something dreamed about by many, and criticized by many more. There is a major possibility that a colony on another planet is the future of humanity. The issue in today’s world is that there are several issues with setting up a colony that seems to prove it as an impossibility for it to occur in the near future. There are simply too many technical problems with the plan for the colony that needs to be addressed and solved before the colony becomes a reality. To begin, one of the paramount problems is cost. It would cost billions of dollars to simply get to Mars to set up the base camp location.[1] This does not even include the trip to send the first manned crew to the location, which in itself would cost over a billion dollars. The total plan for the first year of a colony on Mars is estimated at around $6 million which only includes setting up the first set of humans sent. Any follow up trips to send more humans to populate the colony will cost upwards of $1.5 billion dollars per year. [1]The costs of simply getting to the planet are astronomical and are going to leave a sizeable dent in the countries national treasury. While SpaceX CEO Elon Musk claims that the cost per ticket to get on a spaceship to less than $2 hundred thousand would make it substantially cheaper, there is no way that the costs can be that low in this point in time. His plan involves using a reusable spaceship, and cheaper propellants, which are both not options that have been

Get Access