Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal and founder of Tesla Motors, is the man behind the project to send manned missions and colonize Mars within our lifetime ~ He is quoted to say he wants to die and be buried on Mars~ Here is an article and video with more details on the 41 year old – It seems the consensus is split on Musk as nut or visionary ~
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/17/elon-musk-mission-mars-spacex
Musk made his mark by co-founding PayPal, which transformed e-commerce, in 1999. He sold it three years later to eBay for $1.5bn. When, armed with this fortune, he turned to space exploration, the consensus said he was nuts. Building and launching rockets was the preserve of states – big states, because small states tended to spend a fortune trying and still fail.
He is also the founder/creator of Tesla Motors ~ His company is working on creating a more affordable Tesla car ~ The current version of the all electric Tesla has caught the public interest and is selling well but the expensive price tag has limited the Tesla sales to upper income car consumers ~
The plan, says Elon Musk, is to minimize climate change – and colonize the red planet ~
“The key thing for me,” he begins, “is to develop the technology to transport large numbers of people and cargo to Mars. That’s the ultimate awesome thing.” Musk envisages a colony with 80,000 people on the red planet. “But of course we must pay the bills along the way. So that means serving important customers like Nasa, launching commercial broadcasting communication satellites, GPS satellites, mapping, science experiments. “There’s no rush in the sense that humanity’s doom is imminent; I don’t think the end is nigh. But I do think we face some small risk of calamitous events. It’s sort of like why you buy car or life insurance. It’s not because you think you’ll die tomorrow, but because you might.”