NRL in Talks With Elon Musk to Complete Season on Mars
Will Daly
An audacious plan for the NRL to complete its 2020 season on Mars is currently being discussed with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
NRL chief executive Todd Greenberg, who is spearheading the negotiations, told The Dwarf the talks are the result of “an amazing round of brainstorming.”
“The first session was where the concept to play the remaining season in an isolated country town was born. I liked that idea at first, but something bothered me about it. I reconvened the brains and that’s when we got to the Footy Island™ idea. It was awesome, don’t get me wrong, but I knew we could go bigger.
“The third brainstorming session was next morning, with some idiot yelling out ‘what about the moon!’ ‘The moon‽” I said to him ‘the moon‽ That's lunacy! It's got 17% the gravity of earth. Do you have any idea how long it'd take for a bomb to come down? I don't either, but I'm guessing it's a bloody long time. Let’s try to keep this in the realm of reality, shall we?’”
Greenberg credits the breakthrough moment to a couple of thoughts he had in quick succession.
“My mind turned to the sneaky Mars bar I had waiting for me back in my office. That reminded me of the documentary about Matt Damon being a martian, where I distinctly remember thinking at the end, ‘Living on Mars looks easy as.’”
It appears Elon Musk shares Greenberg’s enthusiasm for the concept. He told The Dwarf there was little in the way of impediments. “All we have to iron out is the issue of getting to Mars safely. Of course, the other issue is how to live on Mars safely. Also, getting to Mars takes between 150-300 days depending on the speed of the launch, the alignment of Earth and Mars, and the length of the journey the spacecraft takes to reach its target. So we’d need to speed that up a bit.”
Greenberg added another potential stumbling block after announcing The Bunker would remain on Earth. “There’s a signal delay between the two planets anywhere from four to 24 minutes. Obviously that’s not ideal.”
Apart from these trivial issues, the NRL CEO was happy to announce an Elon Musk and NRL partnership was “a match made in heaven.”
