According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk, in the early 2000s, after selling the company PayPal, Musk was sitting with some of the company’s alumni in Las Vegas and one of them asked him what he was planning to do next. Musk answered: “I’m going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization.” His former colleague’s reaction? “Dude, you’re bananas.”

True, Musk hasn’t been to Mars yet. But he has built the most successful private space company with rockets that are far superior and much cheaper than anything ever built by government space agencies.

Elon Musk met the renowned aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, at a dinner in 2001. Five years earlier, Zubrin had gained widespread recognition for his groundbreaking book The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet And Why We Must. Inspired by Zubrin’s vision and passion for Mars exploration, Musk founded SpaceX just six months after their meeting, with the primary objective of taking humans to the Red Planet.

While there had been a long period of stagnation in state-funded manned space travel after the moon........

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