Tesla founder, Elon Musk once again vowed to ‘colonize Mars in the wake of the first U.S. lunar touchdown in more than a half century and the first by a privately owned spacecraft.
The company’s Nova-C lander, dubbed Odysseus, lifted off shortly after 1 a.m. EST atop a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket flown by Musk’ Space X from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.
The achievement prompted Tesla’s X account to bring a quote from Musk that was first referenced in Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography of the South African.
I’m going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind multiplanetary civilization,’ the tweet read. Musk’s retweeted the message from his personal account with the accompanying words: ‘Only if civilization lasts long enough.’
The latter is a likely reference Musk’s long held belief that the world is under populating, saying in 2023 that declining birth rates were ‘the biggest danger civilization faces so far.’ Musk has fathered 11 children from three different women.
In 2017, Musk said that the number of people on Earth is ‘accelerating towards collapse but few seem to notice or care.’
Then in 2021 he warned that civilization is ‘going to crumble’ if people don’t have more children.
And just last year Musk described himself as ‘always banging the baby drum’, warning that once the birth rate starts to fall ‘it accelerates’.
He has pointed to a downturn in Japan’s population as evidence for his concerns, claiming the nation would ‘flat-out disappear’ if the worrying trend continues. And Musk warned Italy ‘will have no people’ if its low birth rate continues.
Some countries are taking drastic measures to try and entourage their citizens to have more children.
Low-populated regions in Finland have dished out $10,000, paid over the course of 10 years, for each child a couple has.
According Isaacson, Musk first made his comments about colonizing Mars while reading a ‘tattered manual for a Russian rocket engine’ in a cabana in Las Vegas at a PayPal event.
Former PayPal exec Mark Woolway happened to ask Musk what he planned to do next.
‘I’m going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization,’ he said.
‘Dude, you’re bananas,’ Woolway responded.
Meanwhile on the moon this morning, a live NASA-SpaceX online video feed showed the two-stage, 25-story rocket roaring off the launch pad and streaking into the dark sky over Florida’s Atlantic coast, trailed by a fiery yellowish plume of exhaust.
About 48 minutes after launch, the six-legged lander was shown being released from Falcon 9’s upper stage about 139 miles above Earth and drifting away on its voyage to the moon.
‘IM-1 Odysseus lunar lander separation confirmed,’ a mission controller was heard saying.
Moments later, mission operations in Houston received its first radio signals from Odysseus as the lander began an automated process of powering on its systems and orienting itself in space, according to webcast commentators.
Although considered an Intuitive Machines mission, the IM-1 flight is carrying six NASA payloads of instruments designed to gather data about the lunar environment ahead of NASA’s planned return of astronauts to the moon later this decade.
Thursday’s launch came a month after the lunar lander of another private firm, Astrobotic Technology, suffered a propulsion system leak on its way to the moon shortly after being placed in orbit on Jan. 8 by a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan rocket making its debut flight.
The failure of Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, which was also flying NASA payloads to the moon, marked the third time a private company had been unable to achieve a ‘soft landing’ on the lunar surface, following ill-fated efforts by companies from Israel and Japan.
Those mishaps illustrated the risks NASA faces in leaning more heavily on the commercial sector than it had in the past to realize its spaceflight goals.
Plans call for Odysseus to reach its destination after a weeklong flight, with a Feb. 22 landing at crater Malapert A near the moon’s south pole.
If successful, the flight would represent the first controlled descent to the lunar surface by a U.S. spacecraft since the final Apollo crewed moon mission in 1972, and the first by a private company.
The feat also would mark the first journey to the lunar surface under NASA’s Artemis moon program, as the U.S. races to return astronauts to Earth’s natural satellite before China lands its own crewed spacecraft there.
IM-1 is the latest test of NASA’s strategy of paying for the use of spacecraft built and owned by private companies to slash the cost of the Artemis missions, envisioned as precursors to human exploration of Mars.
By contrast, during the Apollo era, NASA bought rockets and other technology from the private sector, but owned and operated them itself.
NASA announced last month that it was delaying its target date for a first crewed Artemis moon landing from 2025 to late 2026, while China has said it was aiming for 2030.
Last month, Japan became the fifth country to place a lander on the moon, with its space agency JAXA achieving an unusually precise “pinpoint” touchdown of its SLIM probe last month. Last year, India became the fourth nation to land on the moon, after Russia failed in an attempt the same month.
The United States, the former Soviet Union and China are the only other countries that have carried out successful soft lunar touchdowns. China scored a world first in 2019 by achieving the first landing on the far side of the moon.
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