SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, held a hush-hush conference in Colorado this week to formulate a plan for landing people on Mars and building an outpost.
The inaugural "Mars Workshop," first reported by Eric Berger at Ars Technica, happened Tuesday and Wednesday in Boulder, Colorado.
SpaceX reportedly sent invitations to about 60 scientists and engineers, asking them not to publicize the event or their attendance at the workshop. Leaders of NASA's Mars exploration program reportedly attended, but the agency did not answer Business Insider's questions about who from its staff was there.
Workshop attendees were asked to participate in "active discussions regarding what will be needed to make such missions happen," according to Ars Technica.
According to Ars Technica, the workshop may be "the first meeting of such magnitude" in SpaceX's quest to land humans on and ultimately colonize the red planet. (Though a SpaceX representative told Business Insider in an email, "we regularly meet with a variety of experts concerning our missions to Mars.")
It's about time for these discussions, especially if Musk wants to meet his "aspirational" timeline to launch the first human crew toward Mars in the mid-2020s.
"We already have the technology to build rockets and land vehicles on Mars. We've been doing that for decades," D. Marshall Porterfield, the former director of NASA's Space Life and Physical Sciences Division, told Business Insider. "The main hindrance is the human factor. If you really are going to land a person on Mars, you have to feed them, keep them healthy, and build them habitats."
What we know about SpaceX's Mars mission plans
SpaceX/Twitter
Musk launched SpaceX in 2002 in part because he was frustrated that NASA didn't have any actionable plan to land people on Mars.
