In a post on the X platform, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk outlined his vision for making life multiplanetary, emphasizing the need for major leaps in rocket technology to reduce costs. In response to netizens, Musk said that building a city on Mars that can develop on its own may require at least 1 million tons of equipment and 1,000 trillion U.S. dollars with existing technology. This is obviously impossible, and if rocket technology is improved 1,000 times, the cost of becoming a sustainable multi-planetary life will drop to about 1 trillion U.S. dollars.
Here is the full text of Musk’s post:
To reduce the cost per ton of landing on Mars low enough so that humans have enough resources to make life multi-planetary, rocket and spacecraft technology needs to be improved by about 1,000 times.
The most recent U.S. mission to Mars cost about $1 billion per ton of payload to the surface. Plus, over time it gets more expensive, not cheaper!
Building a city on Mars that can develop on its own may require at least 1 million tons of equipment, and therefore more than 1,000 trillion U.S. dollars. This is obviously an impossible figure, because the GDP of the United States is only 29 trillion U.S. dollars.
However, if rocket technology could be improved by a factor of 1,000, the cost of becoming sustainable multi-planetary life would drop to around $1 trillion, which would likely be spread out over 40 years or more, so less than $25 billion per year.
At this cost, it would be possible to make life multiplanetary, ensuring the long-term survival of life as we know it, without materially affecting the living standards of people on Earth.
The Starship spacecraft is designed to achieve over 1,000 times improvement over existing systems, and especially after yesterday's booster capture and precision sea landing of the spacecraft, I am now convinced that it can do that.