Elon Musk’s Dreams of Space Exploration

                  

By Gabriella Wilson, Nathaniel Gorain and Cassius Quinn-Crandall

Long Island City - Elon Musk is following his dream of colonizing Mars and we want to know how HPCMS students feel about that.

Elon Musk is the owner and founder of a private space company called Space-X, a company that constructs spaceships and space shuttles. Founded in the year 2002, the company's main goal is to be able to travel to other planets, but mainly Mars.

There is a lot of conversation about exciting changes to space exploration because of the work of Elon Musk. Musk is an ambitious inventor and scientist who has already had great success with multiple businesses. He has successfully engineered and sold a line of Electric cars under the brand name Tesla.

Now he wants to colonize Mars and so what he is doing is building huge rockets that can take people there. In fact, his company built two rockets designed for this: the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy. According to Space-X, the Falcon-nine is special because it is reusable, meaning it can be used for more than one flight into space, while the Falcon Heavy can carry large crews of people unlike most spacecrafts today.

Musk is also designing a spacecraft that can be used to take people anywhere on earth is less than an hour, reported Space News. This spacecraft is called the BFR, which stands for “Big Falcon Rocket.” This new rocket will be able to carry large amounts of people and its reusable booster engines will make trips to space a little more affordable. Though the rocket would make travelling the earth easier, the main goal for this ship is to fly to Mars. Although this won't be the only spaceship to land on Mars, Musk still want to meet his goal of flying people to Mars and creating a settlement there.

So you might ask yourself: why is space exploration important? Well, space has a lot of mysteries and secrets that can probably help us learn more about how planets were created or even how we were created.

Moreover, new discoveries can lead to our lives being better and easier. Thanks to the thinking of Elon Musk and his inventions of spaceships we can travel to outer space and explore some of these things.

With that said, we wanted to know what students at HPCMS think about space exploration and so we asked some of them. Our first student was Nia, an 11-year-old from class 601. She said that, “there are a lot of natural disasters that could happen or if a meteor hit the earth, we would be in trouble. If Earth gets damaged we can find another planet with a good atmosphere to live on.”

We asked Angelica Almodovar from class 601 how space exploration affects us and she responded: “I feel like space exploration would be kind of interesting to figure out what different kinds of populations or species exist on different planets. If there is a different species on a different planet or somewhere in the universe, we could communicate with them and find out if they do the same things we do.”

Overall most of the students we spoke to said we can find new things in space like new species, rocks, etc that can help our lives or the planet Earth.

With the thinking of Elon Musk and his dream of colonizing space we can accomplish space exploration, meaning we can go out into the galaxy and explore it. Space in general is important to us for many reasons and space is also interesting and inspiring for students to learn about it. As Elon Musk once said “people work be when they know the what the goal is and why” and our goal is to make a change in space exploration.