Elon Musk plans for Mars to be inhabited by around 1 million people. He justifies this number by explaining that Mars would be self-sustainable with this amount of people even if SpaceX runs out of resources to transport more people to Mars. He claims that the first humans will set foot on Mars in January 2025, and that the mission will be completed by 2074, when he estimates the population will surpass 1 million.

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Although Elon Musk’s plan seems as if it is not too far off from now, the plan is still very much in its early developmental stages. While SpaceX has successfully launched and landed many rockets, a great deal of testing still needs to be done in the next nine years. The first step in Musk’s plan is to land the Dragon spacecraft in July 2018, which would carry the first shipment of cargo to Mars. If this mission is successful, SpaceX will continue to transport more cargo to Mars, leading up to the Maiden BFS voyage in December 2022 — this is the mission in which SpaceX plans to send the last shipment of cargo.

By 2025, Elon Musk may have figured out how to prevent human extinction in the event of any major disasters. With global warming on the rise and more scientific research revealing its danger, having a second planet for humans on Earth to turn to may be one of the most helpful solutions that has been proposed to date.

The SpaceX Explosion
At the beginning of September, SpaceX launched Falcon 9 as part of a trial run, and the rocket exploded. Until recently, the cause of the explosion was unknown. They now believe it was due to a helium system breach, but they are still looking into the matter. Luckily, no lives were lost due to the explosion. But the Falcon 9 incident is a major setback for SpaceX and even space travel. This isn’t SpaceX’s first Falcon 9 explosion, either; they had a rocket explode in 2015. These major SpaceX failures have not only cost the company an exorbitant amount of money, but time as well.

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Other Major Spaceflight Disasters
The Challenger space shuttle first launched in 1983, and completed many missions before the 1986 accident, where seven people lost their lives. The space shuttle didn’t technically explode: an issue with the fuel tank led to its failure, which caused the tank to release fuel that created a trailing fireball. One issue with this disaster is that it might have been avoidable if the shuttle had been launched during appropriate weather conditions.

The Columbia space shuttle had completed dozens of successful missions before its failure in 2003. As it was returning from a mission, the shuttle disintegrated, killing all seven people on board. The accident was caused by broken insulation during takeoff, which led to the damage of the shuttle. Oddly enough, some worms that were part of an experiment survived.