The orange sky outside your window is so hazy with toxic dust that you can barely see the two moons over the hills.
There are no oceans or even rain, and the temperatures are so extreme and the atmosphere so thin, you can’t venture out without a protective suit.
Welcome to Mars — or as billionaire Elon Musk hopes mankind soon calls it, home.
But Musk acknowledged that galactic travel is still so risky that when his company, SpaceX, sends its first manned craft to Mars, he won’t be on it.
“The risk of fatality will be high, there’s just no way around it,’’ Musk said during a press conference at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico.
“It would be basically, ‘Are you prepared to die?’ Then if that’s OK, then yes, you’re a candidate for going.”
But “I would like to see my kids grown up,’’ said the 45-year-old dad of five.
As deep-pocketed space-venturing entrepreneurs rush to commercialize interplanetary travel, filling the crater-sized holes left in the industry by NASA’s dwindling budget and stringent safety regulations, Musk stands out as a leading, if not pie-in-the-sky, pioneer.
A week ago, he boasted on Twitter that his “Mars Colonial Transporter” will “go well beyond Mars — so we will need a new name.” On Tuesday, he said his company will start with the Red Planet by hopefully sending an unmanned craft there in about two years.
Musk provided details of the seemingly fantastical venture, from what industries the planet could sustain — “iron foundries, pizza joints, you name it’’ — to how SpaceX would entertain its galactic customers with movies and gourmet fare during their average 115-day journey to Mars.
The company’s reusable rocket ship would launch every 26 months, timed to when Earth and Mars are closest to each other, he said.
The craft — named after the spaceship Heart of Gold from the book “The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” — would start out carrying about 100 people, plus enough supplies to sustain them once on Mars, Musk said. Over time, SpaceX would try to double the number of passengers, he said.
The craft itself would be made largely of carbon fiber and run on methane. That’s important to help create self-sustainability, since methane can be synthesized from elements on Mars.
Musk said he hopes to get travel costs down to around $200,000 per person. It would take 40 to 100 years to establish a fully functioning colony, Musk estimated.
That’s still a pretty lofty goal for a company that’s barely 15 years old and run by a businessman who only has a bachelor’s degree in physics.
In 2001, Musk’s passion for space — which he once dismissed as too expensive to be worthwhile — was renewed when he sold his PayPal shares to eBay for $165 million.
His first plan was to build a “Mars Oasis”: a robotic greenhouse on the planet. “It would get the public excited, and we’d learn a lot about what it takes to sustain plant life on the surface of Mars,” Musk wrote in a 2009 blog posting.
But he soon realized the $60 million price tag for a rocket alone was too much. After two failed attempts at buying used Russian rockets, the idea for SpaceX was born: Musk decided that the world needed reusable rockets if space exploration was ever going to be affordable.
Since its inception in 2002, Space X has produced the Falcon 9, the Falcon Heavy and the Dragon, all designed to bring people and cargo to and from space. As of this summer, the Falcon 9 has been successfully launched 27 times.
Musk isn’t the only one interested in reusable rockets. His billionaire rival, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, has followed close behind with his company Blue Origin, which has plans to bring wealthy passengers on short trips to space using reusable rockets as early as 2018.
“Interested in reserving a window seat? Our New Shepard space vehicle will carry a new generation of explorers and adventurers. We’re looking forward to flying with you!” the Blue Origin website boasts.
Their “Astronaut Experience” includes launching into suborbital space, spending a few minutes floating weightlessly inside the rocket, taking some serious Instagram-worthy photos of Earth from the 42-inch windows that make up a third of the capsule, and then cruising back to Earth, landing “just miles from where you launched.”
They haven’t said how much it’s going to cost just yet.
The Russian company Space Adventures has been sending private citizens to space since 2001, offering adventures such as visiting the International Space Station and “spacewalks” with a “professional cosmonaut.”
Seven private citizens have gone so far, including the founder of Cirque De Soleil, Guy Laliberte, and video-game developer Richard Garriott. But it costs about $50 million.
Virgin Galactic aims for similar heights, but with much lower price tags. It has been selling tickets for a trip to space for $250,000 a pop to celebs such as Justin Bieber, Katy Perry and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Competitor XCOR Space Expeditions is selling tickets for as low as $150,000 and has attracted the likes of Victoria’s Secret model Doutzen Kroes.
Neither company has gotten civilians to space yet.
But even if you can fly people to Mars, how long can they survive there? In comments reminiscent of the Matt Damon flick “Martian’’ — in which he portrays a scientist marooned on the Red Planet — Rick Davis of NASA’s Science and Exploration Division said, “We don’t really know how to survive there . . . When we get there, there’s going to be a lot of improvisation.”
Casey Dreier, director of advocacy at The Planetary Society, added to The Post, “Getting to Mars, you’re going to be exposed to higher amounts of radiation. There’s a higher risk of cancer.”
In 2014, a test pilot was killed during the fourth practice launch of Virgin Galactic’s first SpaceShipTwo space plane, scuttling their plans to be operating in space by 2015.
Most recently, one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets exploded on the launch pad just two days before its scheduled launch, destroying a Facebook satellite on board meant to expand internet service in Africa.
But Musk told the Washington Post in June that the challenge is similar to what explorers faced when first coming to America.
“Just as with the establishment of the English colonies, there are people who love that. They want to be the pioneers,” he said.