SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk has never been shy about his ambitions to save humanity by making it a multiple planet species.
For more than 10 years, the billionaire has championed the idea that humanity's best hope for survival is by extending our reach into the solar system.
During a speech in Guadalaraja, Mexico on Tuesday, Musk finally laid out SpaceX's vision for getting people off Earth and establishing a city — filled with everything from pizza parlors to fueling stations — on Mars.
"History is going to bifurcate along two directions. One path is we stay on Earth forever and then there will be some eventual extinction event," Musk said during the speech before the International Astronautical Congress (IAC).
"The alternative is to become a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species which, I hope you would agree, that is the right way to go," he said.
Musk put forth a lot of information during his 1.5-hour-long presentation, but here are the five most important points about SpaceX's plan to get humans to Mars.
1. A ticket to Mars should cost the same as the median price of a house
Musk knows that the cost of spaceflight needs to come down in order to get some kind of civilization living on Mars.
At the moment, it would cost about $10 billion per person to send humans to Mars. However, in an ideal world, Musk wants to see that number plummet to $200,000 or less per seat aboard a Mars-bound craft.
Musk doesn't expect tens of millions of people will want to decamp for Mars even if it is somewhat affordable, but bringing costs down will at least make it an attainable goal for someone without billions of dollars.
"Not everyone will want to go. In fact, I think a relatively small number of people from Earth would want to go, but enough would want to go and who could afford the trip that it would happen," Musk said.
Musk said he hopes that his company will be able to reduce the cost of that trip by developing new technologies that will bring costs down.
2. The rockets must be reusable
One main piece of technology that could help reduce the cost of flying to space is reusable rocketry, according to Musk.
Today, most rockets are flown once and discarded into space, but SpaceX and other private spaceflight companies have started developing ways of bringing those rocket bodies back to Earth in the hopes of refurbishing them and flying again.
Rocket parts are extremely expensive, so being able to reuse them could greatly reduce the cost of flying something to orbit and beyond.
Both the rockets and the new spaceship SpaceX plans to build should be fully reusable in order to make the Mars outpost sustainable, Musk said.
"It's really difficult to achieve full reusability for even an orbital system, and that challenge becomes substantially greater for a system that has to go to another planet," he said.
SpaceX is already on its way to reusability, however.
The company has brought multiple rocket boosters back down to Earth after flying objects to orbit, and it plans to fly a recycled booster on another mission sometime in the next few months, according to Musk. This will mark the first true test of reusability for the company.
To get humans to Mars and beyond, SpaceX is also planning to develop new fuel types, build refueling stations orbiting in space, and construct machinery that would produce new propellant on Mars itself.
In particular, refueling spaceships in Earth's orbit could save a lot of money because companies won't need to launch a spacecraft loaded down with all that propellant into orbit. Instead, they could save money by launching two lighter payloads with reusable rockets that can be used for missions time and time again.
3. SpaceX wants to start flying to Mars soon... very soon
True to form for the company, SpaceX has an ambitious schedule for making all of this happen.
The company wants to start flying its first uncrewed mission to Mars by 2018, with more missions to follow every two years after that.
According to a very rough timeline provided by Musk during the speech, people would be able to start flying to the red planet with SpaceX by 2024. Eventually, the company hopes to have about 1,000 spaceships flying at least 100 people each between Earth and Mars, and Musk thinks it could take as little as 40 to 100 years to create a civilization on the rusty world.
But there are still a lot of questions to answer before SpaceX can send people to Mars.
Musk still hasn't addressed how people will live, work and eat on Mars and on the way there. Nor has the company addressed exactly how life support systems on the spaceship will work, since they will need to keep people alive on the 3-month trip to the red planet.
It's also important to remember that SpaceX has yet to fly humans to space at all, but that could change as soon as next year when the company is expected to fly astronauts to the International Space Station under a contract with NASA.
Musk's company also just experienced a serious setback when one of its Falcon 9 rockets blew up on its pad, destroying an expensive satellite payload in the process. Engineers are still trying to track down the exact source of the failure.
4. Musk wants to do more than settle Mars
While Musk's ambitions have centered on settling Mars for some years, he isn't limiting SpaceX's capabilities to the red planet.
Musk explained that the company's Interplanetary Transport System could be used to visit other, farther parts of the solar system.
"By establishing a propellant depot in the asteroid belt or on one of the moons of Jupiter, you can make flights from Mars to Jupiter no problem," Musk said.
Musk mentioned that he's particularly interested in visiting Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter thought to harbor an ocean of liquid water beneath its crust. The small moon is one of the best places for potentially finding alien life somewhere far from our own planet.
5. The whole world should get involved
Musk made it clear that his plan to go to Mars needs to be a global endeavor.
He hopes that his speech will inspire people, companies and nations around the world to get involved in efforts to go to Mars and beyond, even going so far as to say that he encourages "people to compete with SpaceX or potentially team up."
“The more the better," Musk added.
Plus, he'll need a lot of people to make this dream a reality.
In total, Musk expects that we would need about 1 million people to move to Mars in order to create a long-term civilization on the red planet. A good number of those people may be from outside the United States.
SpaceX isn't the only organization aiming for Mars.
NASA also plans to launch crewed missions to the red planet in the coming decades. The U.S. space agency hopes to send people to Mars by the 2030s, assuming funding supports those efforts.
NASA and SpaceX are already teaming up on the 2018 Mars mission, with the agency providing some technical support to Musk's company in order to help it get there in the next couple years.