Mars, the red planet has been at the attention of cosmologists and space organisation for a great while now. NASA has sent multiple rovers and satellites to the planet to monitor and study the whereabouts of the mysterious red planet. In the past few years, it is being planned to set up a human colony on Mars. The famous space organisation, headed by the Automobile Company Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk, is all set to send a group of people to Mars by 2024, to start colonising the planet for the future of humanity. 

SpaceX is on a mission to launch a one-way trip to Mars, sending a group of trained and skilled individuals to be sent to Mars, to conduct multiple types of research on the planet. The main focus of the research is to understand the planet in a way that it can be colonised in the near future by human civilisation. 

However, many of us would have been curious about what would it cost, to set up a human city on Mars. Well, someone took the responsibility of asking the CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk himself about the costing of the program.

Mastronauts asked: “My question is, what’s your current estimate on the total cost of having a self-sustaining civilization on Mars?”

And indeed the CEO had to come up with a reply.

Elon Musk’s Reply: “Between $100B to $10T.”

Yes, the CEO himself answered the tweet and his broader estimations suggests that it would cost $100 billion to $10 Trillion to set up a self-sustaining civilisation on the mars. That is just supremely amazing. Company SpaceX is one of the most experts and leading organisation in understanding the red planet. Their research and figures are based on actual studies.

As estimated by Elon Musk, the cost of building a self-sustaining human civilisation city on Mars would cost 10% of the US’ 2019 military budget. This figure is as good as three times the country’s 2018 tax revenue.

In fact, the company is ready to send 2 payloads to Mars which may weigh up to thousands of tons. This payload is expected to be sent by the year 2022, two years before sending humans to Mars. The payload shall include necessary setup, machines, food and many other items which will be needed by the first humans, who will step on the planet under the year 2024 mission. 

Well, curiosity has no limitations, so another guy asked Elon about the costing of sending tons of payload to Mars.

Alexandre J. Tourville‏ : “What about what you said about 1,000,000 tons of cargo to Mars for a self-sustaining city… real estimate, back-of-envelope calc or figure of speech?”

To which Elon Musk Replied:

Elon Musk: “Approx min payload to Mars to the nearest order of magnitude, so at $100k/ton, the cost would be $100B.”

So if the future is about building a self-sustaining city on Mars, we will be required to send cargos. These cargos will be containing infrastructure material, machines and food to sustain until the Mars habitats are able to grow their own food. As being estimated this may weigh millions of tonnes. So if the cost of sending 1 tonne of material to the planet is $100,000, then it would cost around $100 billion, to send a payload of around 1million ton.

Elon Musk has a plan to perfectly colonise Mars in the next 100 years. He aims to establish a base camp for further space exploration on the planet. Also, as per the estimates of many intellectual heads on earth, including Sir Stephen Hawkings, Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, the earth is not going to be the same for very long. Global Warming and Climate change caused by the terrifying human activities have left the human civilisation with only a century-long time to find a new habitable home. Our home planet Earth will soon be on the verge of facing extinction at a large scale and hence the human civilisation needs a backup plan.