SpaceX and Elon Musk have gone from being the preferred object of ridicule for the aviation industry to becoming the operator with the most momentum. All you have to do is take a look at the city that is being built little by little, in Boca Chica, the place chosen to be the base for the orbital launches of the Starship program.

Today, SpaceX sends a rocket into space almost every month, carrying satellites for both companies and countries on its missions, as well as being one of the companies with the capacity to deliver supplies to the International Space Station. All this to finance, in part, the great project of the founder: to terraform Mars and build a permanent human colony there.

"I think it's important for humanity to become a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species. It's going to take a lot of resources to build a city on Mars. I want to be able to contribute as much as possible," he told Business Insider.

An idea that did not arise from a fit but from a dream that took shape in 2012, the moment in which Elon Musk verbalized it before the Royal Aeronautical Society in London. He not only set his goal, but also marked the milestones of his own calendar: in 2018, the construction of the ship that would send the first human groups to another step in Humanity would begin. The official release date: 2022.

For now, his plan is coming to fruition. It is expected that in September or October of this 2021, SpaceX will launch its first orbital flight, the next stage in this particular journey towards what he calls an interplanetary humanity.

In his visionary mind, Elon Musk sees colonies on the Red Planet of up to 80,000 people, with regular flights (although they will last several years) in the purest Ad Astra or Total Recall style.

Living on Mars, beyond cinema and literature

Is it really feasible? In this particular race to reach Mars (and its resources), the aerospace company competes with other private proposals such as Jeff Bezos' Blue Origins, and even with NASA itself and China.

The US space agency has set itself the goal of reaching Mars in 2030, the same date that the power of China will drop, which despite the obvious delay in the development of its space program, cuts the gap year after year.

Regardless of who gets there first, the conditions that astronauts will face there will be very harsh: high radiation loads, microgravity, the passage of time. Is Humanity ready?

Chris Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine, has spent years studying what happens in the organism when a human body remains in space. He was one of the first to point to genetic evolution, natural or forced through genetic engineering, before NASA's program to go to Mars took shape.

In his new book, 'The Next 500 years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds' he goes a step further and formulates what are the genetic changes that man must conquer to land on Mars and other potential habitable planets. Asimov already caught a glimpse of it in his The Foundation trilogy, which will soon become a series on Apple TV.

The genetic changes that will allow man to live on Mars (and it's not science fiction)

His vision, and that of his colleague Kennda Lynch, an astrobiologist and geomicrobiologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston with whom has shared a research project on the effects of space on the human organism for NASA, places Mars as the first of humanity's great options to save itself from extinction.

According to his estimates, in 1,000 years the Earth will cease to be habitable, and therefore, searching for other planets is an act of 'salvation'.

The biggest stumbling block lies in the nature of man itself: in the various studies they have carried out for NASA, they recorded not only the loss of muscle mass in the body, but also in the heart, DNA alteration, decalcification of the bones and various alterations in the immune system.

His proposal involves using genetic technology to activate and deactivate DNA elements that allow greater adaptation to the Martian environment, or to worlds that are colonized beyond the Solar System.

This manipulation does not focus exclusively on adults but directly on the gestation of fetuses. The geneticist points out that this change will be gradual and will take several generations (500 years), although he is confident that the start is very close given the boost to space exploration that Elon Musk has reactivated.