Elon Musk Wants Space Colonists, Not Just Tourists

Posted by michael on Thursday November 11, 2004 @03:08AM from the one-way-trip dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Elon Musk, founder of PayPal and CEO of SpaceX, is not all that excited about space tourism: he wants to colonize Mars. 'I don't think it's a tragedy that people can't have fun in space. People should be able to go if they want to, but it's no great tragedy if they can't. But I do think it is a great tragedy if humanity can't establish itself on another planet. It's the single most important thing we can do to continue the human race.' SpaceX will launch Falcon I in mid to late January 2005."

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Not another planet - Space itself by WhiplashII · 2004-11-11 03:16 · Score: 4, Interesting

I don't think we should colonize another planet. Why waste all that energy getting out of this gravity well only to stick ourselves in another one? I think the future of humanity is to create and live in structures in solar orbit. All the problems can be solved through engineering, just like the Mars problems would have to be. And once we have figured it out, there are no limits on expansion, etc!

Anybody with me?

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