Elon Musk is taking the long view. The billionaire SpaceX founder has long said that humanity needs to expand its footprint out into the solar system — specifically to Mars, which is the most suitable and reachable target — so that we won't go extinct if something bad should happen to Earth.

SpaceX owner Elon Musk detailed his push to make the human race mutli-planetary is to provide it insurance, specifically to save it from being “incinerated” by the sun. The world’s richest man explained that his ambitions to travel to Mars are meant to “better understand the nature of the universe,