Elon Musk: Greenhouse on Mars

Elon Musk discusses his past plans for acquiring more appropriations for NASA by sending a greenhouse to Mars.

Elon Musk: "But I thought, well, if I could do something that would galvinize public interest and then that public interest would translate
to additional appropriations for NASA, increase their budget, then they could do it. So actually what I, sort of, thinking I
would to is send a small greenhouse to the surface to Mars. With seeds of dehydrated gel and then upon landing hydrate the gel,
like grow the plants and the public tends to respond to precedents and superlatives, so this would be the furthest that life's
ever travelled, the first life on Mars. And you can have this great shot of green plants on a red background... Yeah, so you got this great photo. And I thought okay if we could make this happen this would be cool. NASA could get the money
and they could do the, they could send a team to Mars, that'd be great. So I tried to figure out how to do this with the proceeds
that I had from PayPal and I was able to figure out how to get the cost of the spacecraft down and the communications and the
little greenhouse and everything. But the one thing I couldn't compress was the cost of launch, cause there's only a few options,
and the US options are way to expensive. So I ended up going to Russia three times to try to buy the biggest ICBM in the Russian
nuclear fleet."

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   • Elon Musk at Stanford