Says Pace Of Progress Must Increase

With everything going on in the world today, Elon Musk apparently is concerned that he won't live to see SpaceX reach Mars.

That was the SpaceX CEO's message in a speech at the Satellite 2020 conference in Washington, D.C. "If we don’t improve our pace of progress, I’m definitely going to be dead before we go to Mars,” Musk said. “If it’s taken us 18 years just to get ready to do the first people to orbit, we’ve got to improve our rate of innovation or, based on past trends, I am definitely going to be dead before Mars.”

Bloomberg reports that Musk has previously been more optimistic about his company's efforts to reach our nearest planetary neighbor. In November, he told Recode that SpaceX was shooting for a 2024 Mars mission, and he told Axios that there was about a 70 percent chance he'd be on the mission.

Musk said that unless the rate of innovation increases dramatically "there is no chance of a base on the moon or a city on Mars. This is my biggest concern."

SpaceX is one of two companies working with NASA to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station, but those efforts are lagging behind as well. The first SpaceX manned mission to ISS is still planned for later this spring, while Boeing is further behind in its efforts.

(Image from file)

FMI: Source report