Building city on Mars could cost up to $10 trillion: Elon Musk

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has not stopped at lofty talks of colonising Mars. He has even estimated the cost of having a self-sustaining civilization on the Red Planet which is "between $100 billion and $10 trillion".

Musk tweeted his estimates of building a city on Mars in response to a question posed by the Twitter handle @marstronauts.

So according to the estimate by Musk, building a city on Mars could cost anywhere between 10 per cent of the US` 2019 military budget and three times the the country`s 2018 tax revenue, Futurism.com reported on Tuesday.

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Musk calculated the approximate future cost of sending a minimum payload to Mars "to nearest order of magnitude", at $100,000 per tonne.

So if building a self-sustaining city on Mars requires a million tonnes of cargo, the cost would be around $100 billion, he calculated.

Musk earlier advocated the need of a "backup" planet.

Speaking in an interview with Axios in November 2018, Musk said that that there is "70 per cent chance that he will go to Mars", despite a "good chance" of him not surviving either on the way or after landing.

SpaceX is building "Starship" (formerly known as the BFR), a fully reusable vehicle designed to take humans and supplies to Mars.