Elon Musk has plans to send people way beyond Mars

Space X CEO Elon Musk is one of the world's leading proponents of colonising other worlds, but he may not stop at sending people to Mars. The Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT) design, which is said to be capable of transporting 100 people to the surface of the red planet, could potentially go much further.

Musk and Space X's goals over the past few years have been much more focused on getting hardware out of Earth's atmosphere on a tighter budget and they've had many successes. However the ultimate goal is to get to Mars and to colonise it, which is why the MCT design was put together, but purportedly it has the potential to take people further, so Musk may not settle for Mars.

Turns out MCT can go well beyond Mars, so will need a new name…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 17, 2016

Although Mars is likely to be the best place to begin colonising other worlds, there are many other places in our solar system that could potentially become home to human life in the future. The Moon is a possibility, as are Titan, Callisto and even dwarf planets like Ceres (thanks Ars).

The details for what Space X really has planned with its (potentially renamed) Interplanetary Colonial Transporter is something that we'll learn a lot more about later this month. Space X executives will break down the ultimate plan to get people to Mars and beyond at the International Astronautical Congress on the 27th, but Musk did hint at a potential topic of discussion by pointing out that MCT can do much more than take people to Mars.

Any such ship would likely take several launches and some in-space construction to put it all together, but it may be that in just over a week's time we'll know just how long it may be before a real human settlement begins to take shape on another world.

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KitGuru Says: I've seen people complain before that we're a generation that will miss out on space travel, but we are very likely to see the first human flag driven into Martian soil and likely a habitat of some kind along with it. It's an awesome time to be alive. 

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