Corporate Space Race to Colonize Mars: Feasible or Fantasy?


Billionaire Elon Musk has laid out a bold and extremely ambitious vision to send colonists to Mars within the decade. He envisages spacecraft that could ferry 100 or more passengers at a time to the red planet and eventually develop a self-sustaining colony.

But Musk has competition. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos's also has ambitions to put “millions of people in space.”

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And just last week, Dennis Muilenburg, the CEO of Boeing, said that he believes the first people to set foot on Mars will travel there in a Boeing rocket.

So, will this new corporate space race get humans to Mars, and is a future colony even feasible?

Joining host Phil Ponce to share their thoughts are two local scientists and space enthusiasts: Don Lincoln, a senior physicist at particle research laboratory Fermilab; and Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium.


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