Elon Musk appears to confirm 'top secret' plans for Mars

Billionaire Elon Musk is known for his grand ideas, many of which involve travelling to and colonising space, and now he appears to have confirmed “secret” plans for a city on Mars.

The controversial Twitter CEO founded the spacecraft engineering corporation SpaceX in May 2002 and since then, has been on a mission to launch crewed missions to Mars with its SpaceX Mars program.

The program, launched in 2016, has the aim of sending a million people to Mars, requiring anywhere between 80 to 150 days of transit time.

With Musk a busy man since his dramatic takeover of the social media site Twitter, it hasn’t stopped him from finding the time to regularly tweet about his mission to make it to Mars in SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft.

Sign up to our new free Indy100 weekly newsletter

Replying to a tweet of a photoshopped image of him on the Red Planet, Musk appeared to suggest the ambition to get people travelling to and even living on Mars was still a go.

The tweet read: “BREAKING: Elon Musk is planning to build a city on Mars. @elonmusk”

Musk replied: “Top secret.”

However, in the comments, people were sceptical about his plans.

One person replied: “I hate to admit it, but Bill Maher is right. For now, space sucks as a place to live.

“Mars has an atmosphere but not like ours. There is the danger of cosmic rays and zero gravity in getting there. The planet is also not sustainable for life.”

Another fan said: “Take me I hate it here.”

Someone else wrote: “Make sure you give it a really good name when you found it.”

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.