A quarter million tons to Mars: SpaceX’s ambitious vision

Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, outlined his vision years ago to transport humanity to Mars using the Starship spacecraft. Last weekend, a year after Starship’s first trial and a few weeks after the third trial, Musk unveiled an updated plan, which includes the establishment of an independent colony on Mars within two decades.

Musk addressed SpaceX employees at the company’s Boca Chica space base in South Texas. He reiterated the imperative of transforming humanity into a multi-planetary species, transcending the constraints of a single planet, and, in the distant future, into an…