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

4. The Cost

So how much is this all going to cost?

At the moment, there is no crossover between the people who would want to go to Mars, and the people who can afford to, and Musk's main tactic is to bring to cost down by so many orders of magnitude that we could legitimately find at least million people with both the means and the desire to go.

Using our existing technology, the price of a one-way ticket would be somewhere in the region of $10 billion per passenger. Musk wants to eventually get this figure down to $100,000. Whilst that still isn't exactly loose change, it would barely get you a house here on Earth and is definitely within the means of a lot of "ordinary" people.

By using reusable rockets, running commercial projects on Earth, attracting public and private funding, and, bizarrely, Kickstarter (although that might have been a joke, it's really hard to tell with mad geniuses), the idea is to put Mars in reach of anyone who is also capable of getting a mortgage. Musk himself adds, “The reason I’m personally accumulating assets is so that I can fund this, I really have no other purpose than to make life interplanetary.”

Some billionaires buy a private island, some literally build a rocketship to Mars.