“If you’ve got to choose a place to die, then Mars is probably not a bad choice,” said SpaceX’s CEO Elon Musk to an audience of technologists at a recent annual Code Conference. “It’s not some sort of Martian death wish or something. But, you know–be born on Earth, die on Mars—that’s pretty good.”

Billionaire Elon Musk made this assertion against the background that he wants to conquer Mars and enable movement of people at will to the red planet, and his recent successes at launching rockets and landing re-usable rockets on land and on sea.

Musk, also the CEO of Tesla Motors and chairman of SolarCity, seeks for humans to colonize Mars, and he knows it is possible because he’d been able to launch and return rockets to Earth intact against initial fears and tough challenges.

“I think it would be great to be born on Earth and die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact.”

― Elon Musk

In discussing how his firm has been able to successful launch and land rockets, Musk says “Going up and staying up is actually about velocity horizontal to the Earth’s surface. There’s a huge difference between space and orbit.”

According to Musk, objects are able to go and stay up because they do not go straight up as imagined, but rather ascend very fast around the Earth in a way that makes their outward radial navigation equal to the inward acceleration of gravity; and when these balance against each other, net zero gravity is created and achieved.

“There’s no such thing as the term ‘escape altitude,’ just ‘escape velocity,’” Musk said to Fortune.

And why does he always want to land rockets on the sea for the purpose of reusing them? Well, apart from the fact that this is more economical businesswise, “I tell my team, imagine there’s a pallet of cash that was plummeting through the atmosphere and it’s going to burn up and smash into tiny pieces. Would you try to save it? Probably yes. That sounds like a good idea,” he clarified.

SpaceX has launched a good number of rockets for NASA and quite a few commercial ones for countries that need broadcast and communication satellites for research purposes. And to show how much the space company needs to do, there is a six month backlog of launches that needs to be executed as fast as the company can manage it.

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Tunde Eleshin

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