7 Things You Need To Know About SpaceX's Plan To Put A Million People On Mars

7. The Plan

The plan, in essence, is to go to Mars. Soon.

Musk's ultimate aim is to build an off-world colony and finally establish the human race as a multi-planetary species. It sounds like a work of science fiction, and coming from anyone else, many of us would be inclined to think of it as pie in the sky, but when the guy telling you all this has literal spaceships in his (admittedly oversized) garage and a net worth of $11.7 billion, it makes you sit up and listen.

If all goes to plan, as soon as 2022, a Mars vehicle could lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre pad 39. It would carry only enough fuel and equipment to get it "parked" in orbit around the Earth and its rocket boosters would return back to Earth, landing back on the launchpad to be refueled and restocked. Over the next couple of months or even years, the ship in orbit will be slowly stocked with fuel, supplies and even people before firing up its engines and heading for martian soil.

Once we land on Mars, the idea is to synthesize rocket fuel from the local resources, setting up refuelling depots and further reducing the reliance of the Mars colony on mother Earth.

If all goes to plan, Musk envisions a "colonial fleet" of spacecraft, each carrying at least 100 people, to point their noses at Mars and head off into space to establish humanity's first off-world colony, but how on god's green Earth is he going to get us to the red planet?