Syndicated Columnist
Next year on Mars. Well, not quite, but entrepreneur Elon Musk told the tech confab South by Southwest that the interplanetary spaceship he’s building will be able to do short “up and down” flights by next year.
Musk’s goal is to colonize Mars, a delightfully daft idea that has had a persistent hold on our imagination — German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun wrote a piece for Collier’s magazine in 1954 titled “Can We Get to Mars?” — and that is a fit object of Musk’s vaulting ambition.