• by Kaila Colbin , Featured Contributor, March 31, 2017

Yesterday humanity marked a glorious milestone: SpaceX successfully relaunched and re-landed a Falcon 9 -- the first time in history a rocket has been reused.

Reusing rockets is a big deal. In his superb deep dive into all things Elon Musk, Wait But Why author Tim Urban provides a useful analogy: “Imagine the current air travel industry with one key difference: an airplane works for one flight only. Each flight is on a brand new plane, and after the flight, passengers exit into the terminal and the plane is broken down into scrap metal and possibly-reusable parts that are sent off to be refurbished for use in a future plane.

“An airplane costs around $300 million to build. So in this new model, in addition to paying for the crew’s time and fuel, airlines have to spend $300 million extra each flight to build a plane. How would that change things?

“First, there would be very few flights available—the schedule would be limited by the pace of plane production. Second, the price of a round-trip ticket between Chicago and San Francisco would now cost about $1.5 million per person. For economy.”

$1.5 million per person round-trip to SFO sounds crazy, but it’s a surprisingly appropriate analogy. Space shuttle missions cost over $200 million per astronaut. What if they could reuse the rocket?

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk’s projection is that reusable rockets could bring the cost of space travel down 100x. But the implications are way bigger than making it cheaper for communications companies to fling satellites into low earth orbit.

We’ve just gotten a step closer to becoming a multiplanetary species.

Right now, there’s lots of talk of getting to Mars. Even Donald Trump has gotten in on the action, signing an order for a human mission to Mars by 2033.

Going to Mars is one thing. We’ve sent people to the moon; we will eventually send people to Mars. But staying on Mars is something else entirely. In order to stay there, we need to send lots of people. We need ways to get them back if necessary. In other words, we have to make the round-trip flight between planets cost closer to $350 than $1.5 million.

And why would we want to stay there? Simple: to enhance the chances of humanity’s survival.

Right now, we live at risk of a single event wiping out all of humanity. Solar flares, supervolcanoes… In “A Short History Of Nearly Everything,” Bill Bryson describes two recent near-misses, when an asteroid passed within just 100,000 miles of earth. “In cosmic terms,” he said, “this was the equivalent of a bullet passing through your sleeve without touching your arm.”

Keeping the entire human species on one planet is a recipe for extinction.

And so the push to colonize other planets. A sustainable population on Mars means we double our chances of not being on the planet that gets hit by an asteroid.

But going to Mars also gives us a chance to create a new kind of society, without the baggage we’ve built up on earth.

On Mars, we could apply a new model of government. We could invent a new economic system. We could upend the legacy systems -- the historic racism, the systemic inequality, the ingrained poverty -- that make life on earth so painful for so many.

Idealistic fantasies? Sure. But possible. Right now, there are lots of people on earth trying to create systems that are fairer and more just, but they continually run up against the brick wall of civilization’s inertia. The vacuum of space, however, has no such wall.

Time to get off this rock, methinks.