CBS To Launch A Completely New Star Trek Series in 2017

New Star Trek Series Ready To Begin Filming 

Star Trek

Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on emailMore Sharing Services

2

STUDIO CITY, CA / NEW YORK, N.Y. (CBSDFW.COM) – CBS Television Studios announced Monday it will launch a totally new “Star Trek” television series in January 2017. The new series will blast off with a special preview broadcast on the CBS Television Network. The premiere episode and all subsequent first-run episodes will then be available exclusively in the United States on CBS All Access, the Network’s digital subscription video on demand and live streaming service.

The brand-new “Star Trek” will introduce new characters seeking imaginative new worlds and new civilizations, while exploring the dramatic contemporary themes that have been a signature of the franchise since its inception in 1966.

Alex Kurtzman will serve as executive producer for the new “Star Trek” TV series. Kurtzman co-wrote and produced the blockbuster films “Star Trek” (2009) with Roberto Orci, and “Star Trek Into Darkness” (2013) with Orci and Damon Lindelof. Both films were produced and directed by J.J. Abrams.

The next chapter of the “Star Trek” franchise will also be distributed concurrently for television and multiple platforms around the world by CBS Studios International.

The new program will be the first original series developed specifically for U.S. audiences for CBS All Access, a cross-platform streaming service that brings viewers thousands of episodes from CBS’s current and past seasons on demand, plus the ability to stream their local CBS Television station live for $5.99 per month. CBS All Access already offers every episode of all previous “Star Trek” television series.

The new series will be produced by CBS Television Studios in association with Kurtzman’s Secret Hideout. Kurtzman and Heather Kadin will serve as executive producers. Kurtzman is also an executive producer for the hit CBS television series SCORPION and LIMITLESS, along with Kadin and Orci, and for HAWAII FIVE-0 with Orci.

“Star Trek,” which will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2016, is one of the most successful entertainment franchises of all time. The original “Star Trek” spawned a dozen feature films and five successful television series. Almost half a century later, the “Star Trek” television series are licensed on a variety of different platforms in more than 190 countries, and the franchise still generates more than a billion social media impressions every month.

Born from the mind of Gene Roddenberry, the original “Star Trek” series debuted on Sept. 8, 1966 and aired for three seasons – a short run that belied the influence it would have for generations. The series also broke new ground in storytelling and cultural mores, providing a progressive look at topics including race relations, global politics and the environment.

“There is no better time to give ‘Star Trek’ fans a new series than on the heels of the original show’s 50th anniversary celebration,” said David Stapf, President, CBS Television Studios. “Everyone here has great respect for this storied franchise, and we’re excited to launch its next television chapter in the creative mind and skilled hands of Alex Kurtzman, someone who knows this world and its audience intimately.”

“This new series will premiere to the national CBS audience, then boldly go where no first-run ‘Star Trek’ series has gone before – directly to its millions of fans through CBS All Access,” said Marc DeBevoise, Executive Vice President/General Manager – CBS Digital Media. “We’ve experienced terrific growth for CBS All Access, expanding the service across affiliates and devices in a very short time. We now have an incredible opportunity to accelerate this growth with the iconic ‘Star Trek,’ and its devoted and passionate fan base, as our first original series.”

“Every day, an episode of the ‘Star Trek’ franchise is seen in almost every country in the world,” said Armando Nuñez, President and CEO, CBS Global Distribution Group. “We can’t wait to introduce ‘Star Trek’s’ next voyage on television to its vast global fan base.”

CBS All Access offers its customers more than 7,500 episodes from the current television season, previous seasons and classic shows on demand nationwide, as well as the ability to stream local CBS stations live in more than 110 markets. Subscribers can use the service online and across devices via CBS.com, the CBS App for iOS, Android and Windows 10, as well as on connected devices such as Apple TV, Android TV, Chromecast, Roku players and Roku TV, with more connected devices to come.

The new television series is not related to the upcoming feature film “Star Trek Beyond,” which is scheduled to be distributed by Paramount Pictures in summer 2016.

Incredible Facts About The Andromeda Galaxy, Our Nearest Neighbor

Is Interstellar Travel a Reality?

             “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”  So said Carl Sagan.  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put these words in the mouth of his character, Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however, improbable, must be the truth?”

            Many people believe in extraordinary things.  Take UFOs for instance.  “UFO” is simply an abbreviation for “Unidentified Flying Object”  Most people, when they use the word, don’t use it for an airplane they don’t recognize.  Instead, when people say “UFO” they mean “alien space craft.”  Most scientists are very skeptical about the existence of UFO’s.  How come?       

Jerry Pournelle, the noted science fiction author, has enjoyed an interesting life.  He has a Ph.D., he’s worked in politics, and he’s worked in the defense industry for Boeing and had a rather high-security clearance.  He does not believe in UFO’s.  He’d like to, of course.  Most scientists and most science fiction writers would love nothing more than to find real live aliens.  But Jerry Pournelle relates an interesting story that illustrates his reasons for skepticism.

            
During the Cold War, there were reports of UFOs in Chile and Peru witnessed by thousands.  And there was even a government conspiracy and cover-up related to the incident. 

            
There are treaties in place that stipulate that no nation may place weapons in orbit and no nation may build or test orbital bombardment systems. This was also generally interpreted to exclude what’s known as fractional orbital bombardment systems, abbreviated with the acronym, FOBS.  What is a FOBS?  A FOBS is a weapon that is launched into Earth orbit, but is then de-orbited and made to re-enter the atmosphere before it makes a complete circuit around the globe.  The Soviets thought they could launch a missile into orbit, swing it around the South Pole and then deorbit it so it came at the US from our southern border and thus avoid all our early warning systems which were watching for Soviet missile launches from the north.  One day they decided to develop and test their system, despite the treaties, and they had their dummy missiles re-enter the atmosphere over South America.   They hoped no one would notice.

            
Unfortunately, those re-entering dummy warheads were seen by tens of thousands of people in Peru and Chile, making it impossible to simply dismiss all the reports as  hallucinations. So the KGB quickly concocted an explanation.  They spread UFO stories and even made up tales of aliens being spotted.  

            
Meanwhile, our government didn’t want the Soviets to know just how much we knew about their experiments. So the CIA did nothing to counter the Soviet rumors. Thus, the test was covered up by both the Soviets and the Americans, each for their own reasons, but with the same result: people believed they had seen “real” UFO’s.

            
So, when people report they have seen “UFO’s” or been abducted by aliens or find crop circles or mutilated cattle, most scientists are going to first consider mundane explanations for what people are reporting.  Occam’s razor is an important principle for science: the idea that given a variety of competing theories to explain something, the simplest theory that covers all the facts is more likely to be correct than a more complicated theory.  A corollary to Occam’s razor is that a mundane explanation is more likely to be correct than an extraordinary one. 

           
 Although science fiction authors and scientists would love it if aliens showed up, they know the odds are against it.  First, the universe is extraordinarily large.  Even if there are billions of inhabited planets, which is quite probable, the distances between the worlds is so large that getting from planet to planet is beyond any current or projected technology.  Star Trek notwithstanding, not only don’t we have the engineering needed to travel between the stars, we don’t even have a theory that would make it possible. To go faster than the speed of light requires overcoming some very well-established physical laws that tell us it’s impossible.

            
Even given some breakthrough allowing travel between the stars in a reasonable time frame, there are billions of stars—400 billion just in this galaxy—and billions of habitable planets.  Space travel is expensive and hard, even for the basic sort of travel we do now just in our solar system.  So any space-faring civilization is unlikely to have large numbers of starships, and the frequency of travel is not likely to be large, either.  So what are the odds that anyone would visit our particular planet even once, let alone the dozens of times every year they would have to if all the UFO reports are of extraterrestrial origin?

  The more mundane explanations are readily accepted (for the most part) by the public because believing anything else would shatter most people's reality. The world is clearly getting ready to join the greater community, but we still have much work to do. 

New Study Provides Evidence Of 2 New Planets in Our Solar System

There is evidence of at least two planets larger than Earth lurking in our solar system beyond Pluto, a new analysis of "extreme trans-Neptunian objects" reveals.

After studying 13 of these "extreme trans-Neptunian objects," or ETNOs, the obits of these objects are different from a theory that predicts the orbits.

Space.com reports that “the exact number is uncertain, given that the data that we have is limited, but our calculations suggest that there are at least two planets, and probably more, within the confines of our solar system," Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, scientist at the UCM and co-author of the study, said in a statement Friday.

Theory says these objects should have an average distance to the sun of 150 astronomical units. These orbits should also have an inclination of 0 degrees.

One Amazing Video Made From 35 Space Movies - Space Tribute

Editor Max Shishkin combined the soundtrack of Intersellar, the voice of Anthony Hopkins reading Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas, and footage from 35 of the best space movies to make this amazing video.

CINEMA SPACE TRIBUTE from Max Shishkin on Vimeo.

Music: Hans Zimmer - Mountains (Interstellar Soundtrack)
Lyrics: «Do not go gentle into that good night» by Dylan Thomas
Voice: Anthony Hopkins

New Movie 'Interstellar' Looks Promising - Official Trailers

The latest trailer from Christopher Nolan's INTERSTELLAR. In theaters & IMAX November 7th.

With our time on Earth coming to an end, a team of explorers undertakes the most important mission in human history; traveling beyond this galaxy to discover whether mankind has a future among the stars.


Go Interstellar - http://interstellar.withgoogle.com

NASA's New Plans To Hunt for Extraterrestrial Life

NASA outlines hunt for extraterrestrial life

The space agency has used new simulations to determine how best to identify a life-bearing world.

Researchers at NASA's Virtual Planetary Laboratory have been successful in accurately simulating the atmospheric chemistry of extrasolar planets in an effort to better understand the chemical compositions that would indicate the presence of life.

Now thanks to these findings they have been able to reveal the best way to determine whether or not the presence of a gas such as methane means that a planet could have life on it.

"When we ran these calculations, we found that in some cases, there was a significant amount of ozone that built up in the atmosphere, despite there not being any oxygen flowing into the atmosphere," said NASA's Shawn Domagal-Goldman.

"This has important implications for our future plans to look for life beyond Earth."

The researchers concluded that it isn't enough to rely on the detection of just one key gas in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet as there are too many non-biological processes that could give rise to them. Instead, they argue, to identify a planet as a potential habitat for life there need to be indications of at least two of these gases present in its atmosphere.

"Our research strengthens the argument that methane and oxygen together, or methane and ozone together, are still strong signatures of life," said Domagal-Goldman.

Are These Biological UFOs In The Earth's Atmosphere?

There was no description available with this video.

UFO Photo From Space Station Shows Craft & Earth's Curvature

Posters Comments
NASA HD Camera on 7th August, 2014.

NASA Develops Sunflower Spaceship To Hunt Alien Planets With Life - Video

The thought that intelligent life from another planet could one day look into space and see what they consider a UFO that was made on earth is certainly an ironic twist in the world of Ufology. It is will be more and more plausible as man moves further into deep space exploration. 
Richard

PlanetQuest is NASA's effort to search for new Earths, exoplanets like ours that would probably contain life too. They're doing some really cool stuff, like this sunflower-telescope combo spaceship—"a cutting-edge effort to take pictures of planets orbiting stars far from the sun." Imagine that—seeing the actual planets!

It's a simple concept: In order to be able to see planets far away from us we need to block the light of the stars that illuminates them, which is billion times more intense than the light the planets reflect. That's what the flower starshade does:

Working in conjunction with a space-based telescope, the starshade is able to position itself precisely between the telescope and the star that's being observed, and can block the starlight before it even reaches the telescope's mirrors.

With the starlight suppressed, light coming from exoplanets orbiting the star would be visible. Using this technology, astronomers would be able to take actual pictures of exoplanets—images that could provide clues as to whether such worlds could support life as we know it.

There's a reason why the starshade looks like flower too, according to JPL's lead starshade engineer Dr. Stuart Shaklan:

The shape of the petals, when seen from far away, creates a softer edge that causes less bending of light waves. Less light bending means that the starshade shadow is very dark, so the telescope can take images of the planets without being overwhelmed by starlight .

But while the idea is simple and clever, the actual thing is not. It's quite a complicated endeavor, although they are progressing steadily. First, the starshade has to deploy from a tiny package into this complex and huge surface with a complex geometry. And then, even more complicated, it has to move around independently from the telescope, according to Shaklan:

We can use a pre-existing space telescope to take the pictures The starshade has thrusters that will allow it to move around in order to block the light from different stars.

Now I'm excited. I can't wait to have this in space and start seeing the first pictures of real planets beyond our solar system.

Meet Valkyrie - NASA's Super Robot For Mars Mission - Video

NASA's Robonaut is only just getting its legs, but it already has some fresh (and arguably superior) competition. The agency's Johnson Space Center has given IEEE Spectrum a sneak peek at Valkyrie, a DARPA Robotics Challenge entry built to take on dangerous tasks that would normally require a human presence. In addition to sporting more joints than many of its typical two-legged rivals, the sometimes autonomous machine is chock-full of cameras, LIDAR and sonar that help it quickly move around. It can operate under planetary gravity loads that Robonaut can't touch, and even an inexperienced user can keep it running; the modular design lets astronauts swap out batteries and replacement limbs within minutes.

Valkyrie isn't guaranteed to enter service, as it will have to win the support of both DARPA and NASA officials before it progresses much further. If it passes muster, however, it could be vital to NASA's long-term plans for Mars -- robots such as Valkyrie will likely prepare any future Martian landing site and assist humans once they arrive.

NASA Creates Powerhouse Telescope For Deepest Probe of the Universe Ever

NASA is attempting to look deep into the universe

In an ambitions collaboration, NASA has teamed up its Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra Telescopes to conduct the deepest ever probe of the universe where the three telescopes will observe six galaxies over a span of three years.NASA has made no secret of the fact that it wants to learn all that there is to known about the universe and beyond. In a very ambitious collaboration, the space agency has teamed up three of its strongest space telescopes - Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra, to conduct the deepest ever probe of the universe. NASA hopes that this mission will help uncover galaxies that are as much as 100 times fainter than what these three great observatories typically can see.

The telescopes will make use of a natural phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, owing to the large number of natural "zoom lenses" astronomers have found in space. For three years, all three space telescopes will collectively observe six major galaxies to uncover not only what lies within these clusters of stars but also what lies beyond them.

These six galaxies are among the most massive assemblages of matter known, and their gravitational fields can be used to brighten and magnify more distant galaxies so they can be observed.

"The Frontier Fields program is exactly what NASA's great observatories were designed to do; working together to unravel the mysteries of the Universe" said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "Each observatory collects images using different wavelengths of light with the result that we get a much deeper understanding of the underlying physics of these celestial objects."

The first galaxy that the three telescopes will observe is the Abell 2744, commonly known as Pandora's Cluster. This galaxy has caught the fancy of many astronomers because it has been responsible for the formation of at least four separate but smaller clusters over a period of 35 million years. The space agency is hopeful that these observations will help them uncover galaxies that existed when the Universe was relatively young but hadn't been found yet.

"The idea is to use nature's natural telescopes in combination with the great observatories to look much deeper than before and find the most distant and faint galaxies we can possibly see," said Jennifer Lotz, a principal investigator with the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md.

While data collected from Hubble and Spitzer will be used to measure galaxies' distances and masses more accurately than either observatory could measure alone, Chandra will be responsible for looking deeper into each clusters and will use X-ray wavelengths to help determine their masses and measure their gravitational lensing power, and identify background galaxies hosting supermassive black holes. The mission will also make use of high-resolution Hubble data from the Frontier Fields program to trace the distribution of dark matter within the six galaxies observed.

NASA Photo Shows UFO in Space - Photo, Video

Posters Comments

This Saucer shaped UFO appears to be above the Earth however it could also be something else. Possibly a sighting long ago of Planet X or Nibiru? Here is a link to the original photohttp://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/images/...

http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/images/ISD/highres/STS106/STS106-313-6_4.JPG

UFO in Space

NASA Video Clearly Showing UFOs in Space

The two top  videos walks you through some great analysis of NASA photos and video. It clearly shows that some type of craft or entity is in space in reasonably close proximity to the NASA craft. These could very well be UFO entities that are living objects (biological entities) or some source of energy. The third video provides some frame by frame technicalities on how the analysis was performed. The bottom line is that there is little doubt something unknown to man is captured in these videos.  

Posters Comments
When you have seen the video with the "entity passing by the ISS" than you also have seen these strange flashes of light: UFO of the 3rd phenomena. This video continues where the other one stopped. Space is an ocean of life and here's the proof.

Welcome to part 1 of the narrated version of the video: Unidentified Flying Objects





Posters Comment Con't
First I like to apologize for the chaotic commentary in this video. I never make use of a script but simply tell you what comes into my mind when I see the objects again.
This project I have been working on for 10 years. The endresult: 36 minutes of video with close ups of UFO you have never seen elsewhere. (in 3 parts)

NO ONE can explain what I found on NASA TV.

At normal speed they look like flashes of coloured light. They move very fast through space and we normally are unable to see them. Sometimes however when they slow down speed we can capture them for a very short period of 0.035 seconds. (~1 frame)

After recording dozens of hours of NASA live transmissions (HD quality when available) I went through these videos frame by frame. Most of these UFO showed up in a single frame (but there are a few exceptions as I will show you). Each time I saw an interesting UFO (they are with millions!) I made a screenshot.

It is no rocketscience to capture these UFO, so literally anyone can do it without too much effort.

If I can capture these UFO, you can also but so can NASA and they of course much better. NASA knows about these UFO as they took a picture of one of them!

They have all kinds of shapes but I managed to distinct 10 main classes:

green -- round, oval or conical shape
green -- fishlike with skeleton structure
red -- long corkscrew shape with red flash (flash indicating heading?)
red -- fishlike with skeleton structure.
blue -- fishlike with skeleton structure.
blue -- corkscrew with purple skeleton
white -- corkscrew with small vins (like "Skyfish").
white -- with orange centre which is emitting light
white -- round (very small ones, no details visible)
long with multiple colours -- corkscrew type

Before you start asking how I did this: I never could have done this without: (*) Lucis Professional Scientific Image Processing software. (and a few forensic programmes)

I only took the best photos so here's only a very small collection of UFO.

UFO News, Alien Space Probes, UFOs in Australia - Spacing Out

Episode 55

Open Minds covers UFOs in Australia, Alien Space Probes and they check out the MUFON Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Also the latest UFO news and reports are covered in this episode. 

Chinese Official Cut Live Space Feed When UFOs Appear

The Shenzhou 8 spacecraft was automatically docked with the Tiangong 1 space module, launched on September 29, 2011. This unmanned docking—China's first—was followed in 2012 with the manned Shenzhou 9 mission, which performed a manned docking (also China's first) with the Tiangong 1 module. 

This new footage has only come to light and clearly shows several UFOs fly around and close to the Shenzhou 8 spacecraft. At one point the Chinese officials actually cut the live feed when a UFO is clearly in the frame.



UFOs appear in China Space program, Shenzhou 8 spacecraft docking sequence. 

Solid Evidence That DNA Resides in Space - Video

The discoveries were made possible by new technology that speeds the process of identifying the “fingerprints” of cosmic chemicals. Each molecule has a specific set of rotational states that it can assume. When it changes from one state to another, a specific amount of energy is either emitted or absorbed, often as radio waves at specific frequencies that can be observed with the GBT.

Previously, scientists thought such processes took place in the very tenuous gas between the stars. The new discoveries, however, suggest that the chemical formation sequences for these molecules occurred not in gas, but on the surfaces of ice grains in interstellar space.

“Finding these molecules in an interstellar gas cloud means that important building blocks for DNA and amino acids can ‘seed’ newly-formed planets with the chemical precursors for life,” said Remijan.

New laboratory techniques have allowed astrochemists to measure the characteristic patterns of such radio frequencies for specific molecules. Armed with that information, they then can match that pattern with the data received by the telescope. Laboratories at the University of Virginia and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics measured radio emission from cyanomethanimine and ethanamine, and the frequency patterns from those molecules then were matched to publicly-available data produced by a survey done with the GBT from 2008 to 2011.

A team of undergraduate students participating in a special summer research program for minority students at the University of Virginia (U.Va.) conducted some of the experiments leading to the discovery of cyanomethanimine.

“This is a pretty special discovery and proves that early-career students can do remarkable research,” said Books Pate, a U. Va professor who mentored the students.

Source

Are Aliens Communicating With us? Flickering Stars

Should We Be Looking Towards The Starts For Alien Life

When scientists go out looking for research funding  it helps if their projects aren’t all that exciting. Excitement usually goes with the most speculative, cutting-edge science, but funding agencies usually prefer to put their money on projects that seem likely to bear fruit. “You pretty much have to demonstrate that you’ve already done half the work to demonstrate it’s feasible,” says Lucianne Walkowicz, a postdoctoral fellow in astrophysics based at Princeton University.

By that standard, Walkowicz’s latest project shouldn’t be getting any funding at all. She wants to conduct a search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), not by doing anything so conventional as listening for radio transmissions á la Jodie Foster in Contact, or watching for flashes of laser light. Instead, she wants to see if ET’s are somehow manipulating the light coming from their stars so that they wink at us — a long shot if ever there was one, especially since she has no clue how they might go about it.

But thanks to a program titled “New Frontiers in Astronomy and Cosmology,” funded by the John Templeton foundation and administered by the University of Chicago, Walkowicz is getting her chance. Cutting-edge research is what this program is all about, and the question “Are We Alone in the Universe?” is one of the major areas it aims to address.

The odds of a discovery with Walkowicz’s project may be long, but the search technique is quite straightforward. “Our premise,” she says, “is that up until now, we’ve had a preconceived idea of what a SETI signal would look like.” It would basically be the sort of signal we know how to create, and understandably so, since searching for a signal from some entirely unknown technology would be kind of difficult.

If aliens were so advanced that they could cause their star to appear to flicker, however, it wouldn’t matter how they did it, and it would be easy enough to see with existing technology. In fact, says Walkowicz, “our premise was, ‘what if we’ve already detected a signal but missed it because of our preconceptions.’”

So she and her co-investigators (including Princeton’s Edwin Turner, who recently suggested looking for alien cities on Pluto), proposed to look through a potential trove of signals: the archives from the Kepler mission, which has been scanning space since 2009 for stars that are winking because of orbiting planets passing in front of them. Kepler also sees stars that are winking because they have sunspots, or because they’re eclipsed by other stars, or because they brighten and dim naturally, all on heir own.

What Walkowicz and company will do is use software algorithms to look for unusual patterns of variability. “We’ll get all sorts of things we understand,” she says, “but we’ll also be looking for things that aren’t matched by well-known physical processes.”

Naturally, they’ll try at first to explain these unusual variations with conventional physics — and in fact, the discovery of new, natural types of stellar variation could be a valuable side benefit of the project. Big, wide-field surveys of the sky with instruments such as the upcoming Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will inevitably uncover all sorts of unexpected phenomena, so Walkowicz’s work could pre-explain at least some of them.

Once she and her team have ruled out all of the plausible natural explanations for strange flickerings, however, they’ll be forced to consider the possibility that it really is ET calling. “What would lead us to say it really is an alien signal?” she asks. “I don’t know, but in my book, finding things you can’t explain is interesting no matter what it is. If we see ‘SOS, send water,’ in Morse code, that would be great.”

There will probably be a bit more ambiguity than that, she admits, and we may never know for certain that  we’re seeing a deliberate signal. “You don’t want to invoke the strangest thing first,” says Walkowicz, “but we should think a little bit more outlandishly. If we’re always succeeding all the time, maybe we’re not trying hard enough.”

Source

SpaceX Calling for A Mars Colony of 80,000, Video

Earlier this month, SpaceX CEO and Chief Designer Elon Musk unveiled his plans for Mars: a colony of over 80,000 people.

On November 16, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gave a talk before the Royal Aeronautical Society. And at that talk, he announced what his eventual goal is for SpaceX: a Martian colony with over 80,000 people.

“At Mars, you can start a self-sustaining civilization and grow it into something really big,” he reportedly told the crowd.

The colony would start with just a small group of people, armed with supplies including materials to build a transparent dome, which could be pressurized so that Martian pioneers could farm on Martian soil. (Thankfully, radiation isn’t a worry, as Mars’ atmosphere was recently revealed by NASA to shield radiation to the point where humans can survive on the surface.

Space.com contributor Rob Coppinger has many more details about Musk’s plans, so I’ll simply refer you to his excellent reporting if you want to know more.

Suffice to say, however, a trip to Mars is still many years away, but Musk thinks that the colony – which he views as a joint venture between the private sector and the government – would cost about $36 billion to get going. Musk strongly desires to get the costs to go to Mars down to the point where a person could buy a ticket for $500,000.




Right now, though, there’s still a technological development left to do. While SpaceX has successfully made two trips to the International Space Station with its Dragon capsule, the company still hasn’t sent a human being into space. And the rocket that would go to Mars is still at least a technological generation away.

Still, I’ve absolutely no doubt that Musk is sincere in his desire to get to Mars, even if he doesn’t get much of a return on his investment. As he told me earlier this year when I interviewed him, “This is not the path to go to maximize riches. It’s a terrible risk adjusted return. But it’s gotta happen. I think that for me and a lot of people, America is a nation of explorers. I’d like to see that we’re expanding the frontier and moving things forward. Space is the final frontier and we have to make progress.”

Source