Thinking B I G

"Leaving Earth is our destiny. The moon is only a way-station to Mars. I see millions of people there eventually, arriving in waves every two years when the planets are aligned."
"Mars does not have any life, unless it's subterranean, so by terraforming it (creating habitable zones on the surface) we are improving it. And I think property rights, as we understand them here, are an essential part of the process."
"I want to go. It may be a one-way trip for many ... for the initial groups of engineers and scientists. I can imagine living there until I die at 80 --- or whatever. But there is also a lot of work to be done here on Earth, too"
Elon Musk, South African-born computer tycoon: PayPal

Well, Mr. Musk envisions a Brave New World transforming an old companion planet of Earth's, a piece of planetary real estate that he figures is close enough and approachable enough and manageable enough to present as a new home for himself and for any other curious, enterprising explorer-adventurers who would welcome the opportunity to shake the dust of Earth and welcome that of the Red Planet.

Curiously enough, he has a limited imagination when it comes to his own longevity. Instead of a companion-piece in futuristic scientific and biological engineering he bypasses the potential in cryogenetic engineering or cryopreservation which might not be available during his lifetime, while he obviously feels that he and/or any others of like mind could be transported to a new living environment before the possible advent of teletransportation.

If cryogenetic biological engineering or some alternate method of prolonging animal lifespans could be achieved, then Mr. Musk would have the best of all possible worlds, one imagines. But he is obviously focusing on funding and engineering one thing at a time; the building of spaceships meant to take human beings from Planet Earth to Planet Mars, an awaiting and available future homesteading operation within our planetary system.

As it is, his business, SpaceX, has embarked on a successful collaboration with NASA, a fortuitous business deal linking a funding-depleted government agency with private enterprise, handsomely funded through a source called the Internet which also exists in Outer Space to a significant degree. Who, two decades ago, might have imagined the kind of ease of mass communication that is today so pedestrian that it links the Globe?

His is certainly not the only enterprising space-oriented business in town. Having demonstrated to NASA that private enterprise is capable of producing forward models of those government-funded agencies struggled with, at greater cost and fewer alternatives to the distractions of politics, this new private-enterprise technology has its rivals.

Sir Richard Branson with his tourist spaceship test flights; Jeff Bezos of Amazon, building rockets in Texas, and the founders of Google who see huge profit in mining asteroids. Strategizing and diversifying into the stratosphere.

SpaceX employs almost two thousand engineers to refine the 60-metre Falcon 9 rocket, topped with a partially reusable cargo-carrying Dragon capsule. SpaceX has handily stepped into the huge hole in capability and production left by government cut-backs, to deliver cargo to the orbiting Russian/U.S. space station. And in anticipation of the not-too-distant future with individuals opting to become the new settlers in space, millions are being spent to outfit the Dragon for passenger-conveyance.

SpaceX Dragon and the Earth on CRS-2Credit: NASA TVThis amazing view captures SpaceX's Dragon space capsule with the Earth in the background as flight controllers in NASA's Mission Control in Houston remotely operate the International Space Station's robotic arm to dock the capsule on March 3, 2013. The Dragon spacecraft is carrying cargo for NASA under the CRS-2 mission.

New milestones to be met for the United States with its advanced technologies and brilliant minds. One country among an emerging field of countries vying to establish their own presence beyond Earth's atmosphere and orbit. India plans to land on the moon, Iran has claims to have launched its own nascent program and China is intent on building a space station of its own.

Genius is not confined to the Western world; it is shared out equally among nations of the world, irrespective of their politics and even the potential threats they pose to world stability within and between nations. "We have seen some very sophisticated hacking attempts to get into our databases trying to get our rocket designs -- military-class hacking."

"It is hard to trace it back definitively to the source but there are markers that point to China." Military-industrial espionage seems always to point to China. And with good enough reason. The knock-off capital of world production, there are no trade or political secrets that China does not attempt to breach to benefit its own future. But that's quite another, whole, very long story of a grasping, malicious giant.

Elon Musk believes ten or twenty years will prove his point of the accessibility and usefulness of settlements on Mars, benefiting humankind, ripe and ready to leave the cradle of its foundation.