Getty Images/Shutterstock/NASA; illustration by Dave Mosher/Business Insider
Elon Musk.
Katherine Courtney - who has overseen Britain's civil space activity for nearly a year - told Business Insider that when she was born in 1963, sending a man to the moon seemed outrageously ambitious. Six years later, Neil Armstrong stepped foot on Earth's natural satellite.
She says the same logic can be applied to Musk's vision to colonise Mars. The SpaceX founder wants to establish a human settlement on the Red Planet starting in 2022. "We're figuring out how to take you to Mars and build a self-sustaining city to become a truly multi-planetary species," Musk said last year.
On Musk's plans, Courtney said:
"If you look at some of the entrepreneurs out in the US, like Elon Musk, there are lots of people who are absolutely convinced that it's not only feasible [to put humans on Mars] but they have plans to make it happen. It's bold and ambitious to have a vision that says: 'I want to go to Mars and come back.' And actually at one time when I was born in 1963, taking humans to the moon and back safely was a bold an ambitious mission. Now it's almost pedestrian."
The UK Space Agency is itself involved in a Mars mission. The British government is providing £47 million of funding to help send an unmanned rover to Mars in 2020 in a bid to find life on the planet.
Courtney told BI: "That search for signs of life has long been a fascination for scientists and the general public alike. Understanding the history of the universe and that search for signs of life continues to be an interesting and stimulating bit of scientific work we do through the Space Agency."