The countdown is now ticking for when, in less than a week, SpaceX chief and the closest thing we’ll ever have to a comic book superhero (or supervillain, depending on your views on him) Elon Musk finally tell us how his company is going to get us to Mars.
This humbled writer will be right there slightly fangirling waiting to report how his hour-long talk, titled “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species,” at the annual International Astronautical Congress, a four-day affair in Guadalajara, Mexico reveals at least the outline of a long-awaited plan to get humans to the red planet and set up the bases for a permanent, self-sufficient colony. According to the IAC, Musk will cover various obstacles regarding this dream – governmental, scientific and industrial – and the challenges humans will come face to face with as we attempt to colonize Mars.
Interested but haven’t received your invitation to this historical event? The IAC just invited everyone to watch his talk, along with everything else in the congress being live-streamed and ready for every human to tune into.
The Olympic Games of Space, as the IAC is also known, is partly a massive networking event congregating the brightest minds on Earth to ease collaborations and partnerships between agencies, scientists and organizations. It also features a number of important lectures given by scientific celebrities like this year’s Buzz Aldrin, Head of NASA Dr. Ellen Stofan, and Simonetta di Pippo, president of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.
In the event’s official description we learn that Musk will: “discuss the long-term technical challenges that need to be solved to support the creation of a permanent, self-sustaining human presence on Mars. The technical presentation will focus on potential architectures for colonizing the Red Planet that industry, government and the scientific community can collaborate on in the years ahead.”
At the same time, NASA– represented at IAC in Guadalajara not only by Dr. Stofan but by a myriad of head scientists and astronauts– continues its important work and testing stages on its brand new Space Launch System rocket, which will power its own Mars mission with its first unmanned mission coming up in 2018. NASA assures they’ll send humans to Mars as soon as 2033, but chances are next week Musk will lower than timeframe to somewhere around 2024, beating NASA to Mars.
“Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species” will take place Tuesday, September 27, from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. CST. Look up the live stream here at that time, and be ready for one heck of a speech.