Billionaire Elon Musk on Wednesday made a bold prediction stating that his company SpaceX could take humans to Mars in the next 20 to 30 years.
In a recent interview with Fox News, a clip of which Musk shared on his X account, the SpaceX CEO said that his company is not only aiming to send astronauts but also common people on the historic space journey in the next 2-3 decades.
“We would be able to take astronauts to Mars. In fact, we want to take anyone who goes to Mars,” Musk said adding, “that is the long-term goal of the company.”
When asked about the timeline of such a bold aim, Musk said that “it will be possible to do that in the next 20 to 30 years.”
Musk’s SpaceX capsule brings Sunita Williams, Butch Wilmore to Earth
Musk’s remarks came on the heels of a successful SpaceX mission which brought NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams back to Earth on Tuesday with a soft splashdown off Florida’s coast, nine months after their faulty Boeing Starliner craft.
Crew Dragon is the only US spacecraft capable of flying people in orbit.
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Their return caps a protracted space mission that was fraught with uncertainty and technical troubles, turning a rare instance of NASA’s contingency planning – and the latest failures of Starliner – into a global and political spectacle.
Elon Musk on NASA astronauts’ return
Musk expressed his pride in the SpaceX team for their excellent work, saying, “Thanks to the excellent work of the SpaceX team working with NASA, the astronauts are now safely home.”
Trump told Fox News on Tuesday that Wilmore and Williams will visit the Oval Office after they recover from their mission.
Wilmore and Williams, two veteran NASA astronauts and retired US Navy test pilots, had launched into space as Starliner’s first crew in June for what was expected to be an eight-day test mission.
But issues with Starliner’s propulsion system led to cascading delays to their return home, culminating in a NASA decision to fold them into its crew rotation schedule and return them on a SpaceX craft this year.
NASA officials have said the two astronauts had to remain on the ISS to maintain adequate staffing levels and it did not have the budget or the operational need to send a dedicated rescue spacecraft. Crew Dragon flights cost between $100 million to $150 million.
