Elon Musk Says ‘It’s a Fixer Upper of a Planet’: Can We Live on Mars?

NASA’s Perseverance rover fires up its descent stage engines as it nears the Martian surface to land in the area known as Jezero crater on the planet Mars, in this concept illustraion provided by NASA. NASA/Illustration via Getty Images

Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to add some thoughts on his goal to make life on Mars a reality.

“Mars may be a fixer upper of a planet, but it has great potential,” Musk said in a tweet on July 15. When asked about his time frame for creating a self-sustaining civilization on the red planet, he responded, “20 to 30 years from first human landing if launch rate growth is exponential,” adding that this “assumes transferring ~100k each rendezvous and ~1M total people needed” to make a fully independent society.