SpaceX founder Elon Musk on Tuesday unveiled ambitious plans to establish a Mars colony by sending 100 people at a time on massive spacecraft, possibly costing as low as US$100,000 per person.
Taking the stage under a large globe of Mars at the International Astronautical Congress, Musk showed his vision for a giant rocket that would propel people to the Red Planet “in our lifetime.”
“We need to go from these early exploration missions to actually building a city,” he said to an overflow crowd at an expo center in the western Mexican city of Guadalajara.
Photo: EPA
Musk showed a futuristic video depicting his concept of an interplanetary transport system based on reusable rockets, a propellant farm on Mars and 1,000 spaceships on orbit, carrying about 100 people each.
The spacecraft would have a restaurant, cabins, zero-gravity games and movies.
“It has to be fun or exciting. It can’t feel cramped or boring,” he said.
Musk later told reporters he was “optimistic” that the first human mission could leave Earth in 2024 and arrive on the Red Planet the following year.
Before that, SpaceX plans to send an unmanned Dragon cargo capsule to Mars as early as 2018.
The South Africa-born Canadian-American entrepreneur said the plan would require a “huge public-private partnership,” but he did not announce any alliance with a government agency.
The first flight would be expensive, but the aim is “making this affordable to almost anyone who wants to go,” by dropping the price of a ticket over time from US$200,000 to US$100,000, Musk said.
“You can’t create a self-sustaining civilization on Mars if the ticket price is US$10 billion per person,” he said.
It could also be deadly.
“I think the first trips to Mars are going to be really, very dangerous. The risk of fatality will be high. There is just no way around it,” he said. “It would basically be: ‘Are you prepared to die?’ Then if that’s ok, then you are a candidate for going.”
While SpaceX was hit by a setback on Sept. 1 when its Falcon 9 rocket, after several successful missions and vertical landings, exploded on the launch pad during a test in Florida, Musk said: “This is just a small thing on a long road.”
SpaceX is not alone in aspiring to travel to Mars.
NASA, which is studying the effects of long-term space flight on the human body, has announced its own plans to send people to Mars by the 2030s.
Blue Origin, a company founded by Amazon.com boss Jeff Bezos, also envisions a Mars mission, but decades from now.
Experts warn that reaching Mars — 225 million kilometers from Earth on average — and living there require major engineering feats and a massive budget.
John Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, said Musk’s presentation was “long on vision, short on detail.”
Musk did not explain in detail how he would get the “billions of dollars that would be required to put the vision into reality.”
The plan also faces technical challenges, such as refueling in orbit, which has never been done, and building fuel depots on Mars.
Chris Carberry, chief executive of Explore Mars Inc, a non-profit promoting the goal of sending humans to the planet within two decades, said a mission of just three to six people would cost between US$80 billion and US$120 billion.
Musk’s presentation is “very inspiring, aspirational, but I think it’s going to be very challenging to be able to accomplish this in 10 years.”
“I think it’s probably more likely we’re going to send a smaller mission to first figure out if people can live on Mars before we send 100 people there at a time,” he said.
Musk said the rocket would take a spaceship into orbit, release it and land back on Earth to pick up a fuel tanker, which it would fly to the craft to fuel its journey to Mars.
The trip would one day take as little as three months, or even less than one month.
Once on Mars, humans would have to install a plant to produce propellant by using the planet’s methane resources to fuel the spacecraft for its return to Earth.
SpaceX has achieved engineering breakthroughs, notably by successfully landing the Falcon 9 upright, which could cut space travel costs by making rockets reusable.
Blue Origin has also built a rocket that lands vertically and is working on a taller launcher called New Glenn, but the company is focusing on sending people to Earth’s low orbit for now.
“We want to have millions of people living and working in space in a decades timeframe if they want to,” Blue Origin president Rob Meyerson said.
BACKLASH: The National Party quit its decades-long partnership with the Liberal Party after their election loss to center-left Labor, which won a historic third term Australia’s National Party has split from its conservative coalition partner of more than 60 years, the Liberal Party, citing policy differences over renewable energy and after a resounding loss at a national election this month. “Its time to have a break,” Nationals leader David Littleproud told reporters yesterday. The split shows the pressure on Australia’s conservative parties after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s center-left Labor party won a historic second term in the May 3 election, powered by a voter backlash against US President Donald Trump’s policies. Under the long-standing partnership in state and federal politics, the Liberal and National coalition had shared power
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
CONTROVERSY: During the performance of Israel’s entrant Yuval Raphael’s song ‘New Day Will Rise,’ loud whistles were heard and two people tried to get on stage Austria’s JJ yesterday won the Eurovision Song Contest, with his operatic song Wasted Love triumphing at the world’s biggest live music television event. After votes from national juries around Europe and viewers from across the continent and beyond, JJ gave Austria its first victory since bearded drag performer Conchita Wurst’s 2014 triumph. After the nail-biting drama as the votes were revealed running into yesterday morning, Austria finished with 436 points, ahead of Israel — whose participation drew protests — on 357 and Estonia on 356. “Thank you to you, Europe, for making my dreams come true,” 24-year-old countertenor JJ, whose
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
RSS