Don't expect to hear any nostalgia about the soon-to-end space shuttle era from Elon Musk, the millionaire founder of Space Exploration Technologies. Musk isn't prone to look to the past, but rather to the future — to a "new era of spaceflight" that eventually leads to Mars.
SpaceX may be on the Red Planet sooner than you think: When I talked with him in advance of the shuttle Atlantis' last liftoff, the 40-year-old engineer-entrepreneur told me the company's Dragon capsule could take on a robotic mission to Mars as early as 2016. And he's already said it'd be theoretically possible to send humans to Mars in the next 10 to 20 years — bettering NASA's target timeframe of the mid-2030s.
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