Space X and Its Ambitions Toward Mars

In 2002, Pay Pal founder Elon Musk established Space X, the commonly known name for Space Exploration Technologies Corporation.  He decided to start his company on a small scale, with the notion of building a reusable rocket/capsule system that would eventually become capable of deep-space human travel.  The first successful rocket launch was in 2008, and after President Obama essentially privatized the future of manned space travel, the company grew in importance, working closely with NASA on various projects.  It suffered a setback in 2015 when one of its home-manufactured rockets exploded soon after launch on an unmanned supply mission to the International Space Station.  The problem was discovered and fixed, though, and last month another Space X resupply mission to the station was successful.  Next year it plans to launch a manned crew on its Falcon-9 rocket to the space station, but that's where the low-Earth-orbiting ends and the true adventure begins...

The ultimate goal for Space X, as Elon Musk has expressed in interviews and to others, is to establish human colonies on Mars...and in an astonishingly short period of time.  An unmanned landing of the Dragon spacecraft is planned for 2018, and subsequent unmanned trips are scheduled during the following years in order to transport supplies for colony-building.  The first humans to Mars, on their timetable, will land there around 2025.  And if all continues to go according to plan, in the subsequent ten years or so, there will be thousands of flights to the Red Planet, feeding and growing a new human Martian population eventually to number in the millions.  To all of which I say, "It's about damned time!"  I've been living my whole life waiting for the science fiction stories of my youth about extraterrestrial colonization to be realized, and I was consigning my hopes on the subject to the growing trash heap of my other dashed dreams.  But now, here comes this upstart company with its outrageous vision.  Will they succeed?  I'm in no position to answer that, but I strongly want them to...