Elon Musk, the big-thinking founder of PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX, believes establishing a self-sustaining colony on Mars will be the only way humans will survive long-term, and he’s outlined a plan for making his vision a reality.

“Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species” details the hurdles humans must overcome in order to colonize Mars in the near future and provides a roadmap for our evolution into a multi-planetary civilization, with routine manned trips to other planets. Musk presented the ideas at the 2016 International Astronautical Congress. The paper is available online to the public until early July.

Musk did not set a timeline for the plan, but he has said he hopes SpaceX can complete a “first development” spaceship in four years.

There’s a few items on the interplanetary travel to-do list, though. Among the challenges:

1. Get the ticket price to $200,000 per person

Musk calculates that taking a traditional, Apollo-style approach – the NASA program that landed 12 astronauts on the moon – to mount a mission to Mars would end up costing about $10 billion per person in current-year dollars. That’s a “steep price,” he notes.

However, if the cost of moving to Mars were equivalent to the median U.S. house price of $200,000, the probability of motivated movers willing to relocate some 140 million miles would soar. At that price, he figures, establishing a self-sustaining civilization “would almost certainly occur.”

The cost would go down over time. Especially with sponsors willing to underwrite some passengers, “it gets to the point where almost anyone, if they saved up and this was their goal, could buy a ticket and move to Mars,” Musk said.

2. Invent a powerful, fully reusable spacecraft

Building a one-and-done spacecraft good for just a one-way trip is too costly for to create a self-sustaining city. The inter-planetary travel system must be fully reusable for frequent flights – “super-hard” but essential, Musk said.

Developing the Raptor engine, the highest chamber pressure engine ever built, and a rocket booster will be among the biggest challenges of developing the interplanetary spaceship, Musk said. 

He describes ships initially designed to carry 100 passengers each, plus their luggage and cargo space sufficient to transport material required “to build everything from iron foundries to pizza joints to you name it.”

3. Figure out how to refuel in orbit

To maximize the payload and to reduce the cost of developing the vehicle, it makes sense to send the spaceship into flight with fuel tanks essentially dry. Refueling while the craft was in orbit would spread the required lift capacity across multiple launches.

4. Create a propellant plant on Mars

A self-sustaining community needs return-trip service to Earth, so producing rocket fuel on the Red Planet would be a must. “It would be pretty absurd to try to build a city on Mars if your spaceships just stayed on Mars and did not go back to Earth,” said Musk. “You would have a massive graveyard of ships; you have to do something with them.” Mars pretty much has what it takes to make fuel, Musk says: carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and water in the form of ice in the soil.

All that’s just a start, of course.

To meet the threshold of delivering one million people for a sustainable colony calls for a fleet of about 1,000 ships and 10,000 flights. It would take between 20 to 50 total Mars rendezvous and some 40 to 100 years to achieve a fully self-sustaining civilization on Mars, Musk says.

The trip to Mars could take as little as 80 days – not bad considering the months-long ocean sailing journeys endured by pilgrims of the past.

To make the journey more appealing, Musk envisions lots of in-flight entertainment

“It has got to be really fun and exciting – it cannot feel cramped or boring,” he said. Musk describes in-flight zero-gravity games and other diversions. “You can float around,” he said. “There will be movies, lecture halls, cabins and a restaurant. It will be really fun to go.”

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