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Sep 8, 2024 · SpaceX plans to start launching uncrewed Mars missions with its Starship megarocket in 2026 and crewed flights to the Red Planet two years after that, Elon Musk said.
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The SpaceX plan for building a Mars settlement includes refueling in orbit, a fleet of passenger ships, and the biggest rocket ever made.
GUADALAJARA, MexicoIn perhaps the most eagerly anticipated aerospace announcement of the year, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has revealed his grand plan for establishing a human settlement on Mars.
In short, Musk thinks it’s possible to begin shuttling thousands of people between Earth and our smaller, redder neighbor sometime within the next decade or so. And not too long after that—perhaps 40 or a hundred years later, Mars could be home to a self-sustaining colony of a million people.
“This is not about everyone moving to Mars, this is about becoming multiplanetary,” he said on September 27 at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. “This is really about minimizing existential risk and having a tremendous sense of adventure.”
Musk’s timeline sounds ambitious, and that's something he readily acknowledges.
“I think the technical outline of the plan is about right. He also didn’t pretend that it was going to be easy and that they were going to do it in ten years,” says Bobby Braun, NASA’s former chief technologist who’s now at Georgia Tech University. “I mean, who’s to say what’s possible in a hundred years?”
Though he admitted his exact timeline is fuzzy, Musk thinks it’s possible humans could begin flying to Mars by the mid-2020s. And he thinks the plan for getting there will go something like this:
SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System
Watch an animation of Elon Musk's vision for how to send humans to Mars.
It starts with a really big rocket, something at least 200 feet tall when fully assembled. In a simulation of what SpaceX calls its Interplanetary Transport System, a spacecraft loaded with astronauts will launch on top of a 39-foot-wide booster that produces a whopping 28 million pounds of thrust. Using 42 Raptor engines, the booster will accelerate the assemblage to 5,374 miles an hour.
Overall, the whole thing is 3.5 times more powerful than NASA’s Saturn V, the biggest rocket built to date, which carried the Apollo missions to the moon. Perhaps not coincidentally, the SpaceX rocket would launch from the same pad, 39A, at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The rocket would deliver the crew capsule to orbit around Earth, then the booster would steer itself toward a soft landing back at the launch pad, a feat that SpaceX rocket boosters have been doing for almost a year now. Next, the booster would pick up a fuel tanker and carry that into orbit, where it would fuel the spaceship for its journey to Mars.
After landing a few cargo-carrying spacecraft without people on Mars, starting with the Red Dragon capsule in 2018, Musk says the human phase of colonization could begin.
For sure, landing a heavy craft on a planet with a thin atmosphere will be difficult. It was tough enough to gently lower NASA’s Curiosity rover to the surface, and at 2,000 pounds, that payload weighed just a fraction of Musk’s proposed vessels. For now, Musk plans to continue developing supersonic retrorockets that can gradually and gently lower a much heavier spacecraft to the Martian surface, using his reusable Falcon 9 boosters as a model.
And that’s not all these spacecraft will need: Hurtling through the Martian atmosphere at supersonic speeds will test even the most heat-tolerant materials on Earth, so it’s no small task to design a spacecraft that can withstand a heated entry and propulsive landing—and then be refueled and sent back to Earth so it can start over again.
The first journeys would primarily serve the purpose of delivering supplies and establishing a propellant depot on the Martian surface, a fuel reservoir that could be tapped into for return trips to Earth. After that depot is set up and cargo delivered to the surface, the fun can (sort of) begin. Early human settlers will need to be good at digging beneath the surface and dredging up buried ice, which will supply precious water and be used to make the cryo-methane propellant that will power the whole enterprise.
As such, the earliest interplanetary spaceships would probably stay on Mars, and they would be carrying mostly cargo, fuel, and a small crew: “builders and fixers” who are “the hearty explorer type,” Musk said to Howard. “Are you prepared to die? If that’s OK, then you’re a candidate for going.”
While there will undoubtedly be intense competition and lots of fanfare over the first few seats on a Mars-bound mission, Musk worries that too much emphasis will be placed on those early bootprints.
But Musk is used to that. In 2001, he founded SpaceX with one goal in mind: put humans on Mars. At the time, he recalls, he found himself thinking about why, after the successful Apollo missions to the moon, humans hadn’t visited Mars—or reached very far into space at all.
“It always seemed like we should have gone there by now, and we should have had a base on the moon, and we should have had space hotels and all these things,” he said to Howard. “I’d assumed that it was a lack of will … it was not a lack of will.”
I think what we want to avoid is a replay of Apollo.
ByElon MuskSpaceX
Instead, resources devoted to space exploration were scarce, and government spaceflight programs couldn’t assume the kind of risk that a private endeavor could tolerate. With an accumulated fortune from his time at Paypal, Musk founded a company dedicated to building rockets and vastly improving the vehicles that form the foundation of an interplanetary journey.
Contracts with private clients and the U.S. government followed, and now SpaceX is working on a version of its Dragon capsule that can send humans to the International Space Station.
Musk’s ultimate vision of a second, self-sustaining habitat for humans in the solar system is grand and lofty, but by no means unique. What makes Musk’s plan stand out from centuries of science fiction is that he might actually be able to make it happen—if he can bring costs down to his ideal levels.
“Entrepreneurs are able to look at questions that we think about, but we’re not quite ready to go there yet, things like supersonic retrograde propulsion,” said NASA administrator Charlie Bolden during a panel at the IAC.
"I think we can quibble over the numbers and the dollars and the timeframes and all, but we shouldn’t lose the fact that this guy went out on the international stage today and just laid it all out on the line," Braun adds. "I found it refreshing."
But for Mars to be a viable destination, Musk says the cost of the trip needs to come down to about $200,000, or the average price of a house in the United States. Trouble is, that’s a significant decrease from current cost estimates.
Musk doesn’t anticipate being able to do all of this on his own and said to Howard that some sort of synergistic relationship between governments and private industry will be crucial.
“I think we want to try to get as much in the way of private resources dedicated to the cause, and then get as much as possible in the way of government resources, so that if one of those funding sources disappears, things continue.”
Jul 11, 2024 · Musk has largely kept the colonization plans quiet because SpaceX, under a $2.9 billion contract with NASA, must first send a rocket to the moon, two people with knowledge of the company said.
Apr 11, 2022 · SpaceX. Ready to live on Mars? It may not happen for a while, as Elon Musk recently revealed that astronauts on the red planet could finally become reality by 2029. The SpaceX CEO has a...
Apr 11, 2024 · Elon Musk is doubling down on his commitment to the colonization of Mars. In an address at SpaceX's Starbase facility at Boca Chica, Texas, he gave an update on how the advances in the...
- david.szondy@gizmag.com
Jul 11, 2024 · The billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is ramping up plans for mankind's arrival to Mars and then the planet's colonization, according to a report from The New York Times.
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1 day ago · Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Inc. TSLA, has expressed confidence in sending uncrewed Starships to Mars within two years, carrying Tesla Cybertrucks and Optimus robots as payloads.
