This is The Guardian.

Space-settling enthusiasts have long had an eye on the red planet.

I recently found an old book from the 70s,

I was saying, yeah, there's going to be colonies on Mars in the 2020s.

They were completely wrong.

We may have landed the Curiosity rover over a decade ago, but Mars has remained out of reach for non-robotic visitors.

That hasn't put off Giant Check distributor and CEO of

rocket ship company SpaceX, Elon Musk, who has been making some pretty ambitious claims,

including that people will be there by 2030. We thought maybe this was coming soon,

and of course if you listen to Elon Musk, it's like right around the corner.

You think about the future is just, if we're out there exploring science, it's so much more exciting and inspiring than one where we are forever confined to Earth.

And a Mars mission?

Yeah, so in order to make Mars work, we need kind of the next generation of rockets and spacecraft. We think we've

got something that will enable people to move to Mars for approximately half a million dollars.

Reusable rockets, modern medicine and superpowered computers are bringing the red planet

closer than ever. But there's way, way, way more to it than even just getting there and setting up camp.

You have to consider questions like,

what kind of policing and punishment system are we going to use in space?

Because you're taking humans out to space, they're going to do things wrong.

And so it's going to be difficult to have jails, for example, because that's

going to take a dedicated space. And now somebody who could have been helping farming is not going

to be working.

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