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SpaceX made some awesome travel posters for Mars

SpaceX made some awesome travel posters for Mars

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With all the recent news about International Space Station resupply missions, reusable rockets, and drone barges, it's easy to forget that reason Elon Musk created SpaceX in the first place is to help land humans on Mars. In a way, it's great that we're so familiar with the private space company's day-to-day operations that we've traded talk of colonizing planets for details about contract disputes with the Air Force; it's exciting that the business of space travel is becoming normal, even if it's difficult and tedious. But dreaming about traveling to another planet is surely more exciting, and the company has just released a few vintage-styled travel posters that should help do the trick.

The three images look less like they were posted to a Flickr account and more like they were torn off the wall of a 1950s travel agency. Each one frames a part of the Red Planet in such a familiar way that Mars feels like a tourist destination you could visit tomorrow, not decades from now.

"Discover Valles Marineris"

In one, a man and woman gaze through the window of their Martian gondola at Olympus Mons, which the poster reminds you is "the solar system's highest peak." In another, a man in a jetpack (no, not that one) flies over Valles Marineris — the 2,500-mile-long stretch of canyons that scar the surface of Mars — toward a cliff to meet his family next to some sort of futuristic Airstream. And the third promotes Phobos and Deimos — the two oblong moons of Mars — as off-planet cruise destinations. (Nevermind that summering on either moon would be extraordinarily difficult since most people wouldn't weigh more than one pound on either.)

There are a few tiny details worth inspecting in high resolution, too, like the bold adventurers who are scaling Olympus Mons, and some cleverly placed SpaceX logos. It's a dead simple and inspiring PR move by the company, and it doesn't hurt that it comes just days after Musk found himself deflecting some unflattering accusations. If only we could all just escape to Mars.

SpaceX Mars poster
SpaceX Mars poster
SpaceX Mars poster