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.”
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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