Joining the Thrillionaires 319
can today hear the same reasoning regarding a manned
mission to Mars. “Since 1989, when a study estimated that
a manned mission [to Mars] would cost $500 billion, the
subject has been toxic,” Elon said.^305
Traveling to space is expensive. Elon argued it’s worth
the same amount of money we put on lipsticks or cosmetics
each year, but less than what we spend on health care.^350
The former US President John F. Kennedy made a similar
comparison. “This year’s space budget is three times what it
was in January 1961, and it is greater than the space budget
of the previous eight years combined,” he said. “That budget
now stands at $5 400 million a year – a staggering sum,
though somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars
every year.”^19
“Some money has to be spent on establishing a base on
Mars,” Elon said. “It’s about getting the basic fundamentals
in place. That was true of the English colonies [in America];
it took a significant expense to get things started.”^313 But
after things got started, the infrastructure in America im-
proved each year, and it became cheaper and faster to travel
across the Atlantic Ocean. The reasonTitaniccollided with
an iceberg was that the owner demanded that their ship
should be the fastest across the Atlantic Ocean. In a similar
way, future spaceships will compete in who can travel the
fastest from Earth to Mars, hopefully without colliding
with an asteroid.
Several old ideas on how to travel to Mars are col-
lected in the bookHumans to Mars: Fifty Years of Mission
Planning. Wernher von Braun wrote the novelThe Mars