We'll never know if Elon Musk once woke up on the better side of the bed and screamed,
"I can do it," perhaps out of one of his many inspired dreams about how he can send humans
to Mars within a few weeks, rather than the usual 5 to 7 months it should take; and now
engineers have suggested to him about an obvious fashion he could employ to send the starship
to Mars in a matter of weeks, and Musk marveled.
Now think about it this way: who would want to spend a full seven months on a single journey?
Traveling aboard the starship, some people will suffocate and pass out. Many people would
not want to travel, and it should not be an uncomfortable scenario in which Musk would
want to place us. The good news is that engineers have come up with a completely new plan to
take the starship to Mars within weeks, and that is the real deal, since people will only
want to be part in a type of quicker flying, similar to how commercial aircrafts work.
Hello and welcome to Tech Space. In this video, we will present you to a crazy notion that
engineers believe Musk might tweak to enable the starship to reach Mars in a couple of
weeks. And don't forget to watch this video to the end to discover the earth-shaking starship
proportion concept that has been kept hidden for decades.
Elon Musk is relentless, and he appears overconfident that his rocket firm SpaceX will land humans
on Mars in 2026, where he intends to establish humanity.
Musk stated in a recent audio-only Clubhouse interview that it will take "five and a half
years" for a crewed flight of SpaceX's Starship rocket to land on Mars.
When an insider spoke with Greg Autry, a commercial space industry specialist, who believes Musk
will reach Mars in 2029 or 2031, either on his own or in collaboration with NASA. The
window is determined by the Earth's alignment with Mars, which occurs every 26 months. However,
Autry cautioned that space missions are difficult and seldom completed on schedule, and Musk's
plan is no exception.
"It comes down to money and willpower. Elon possesses both "He stated.
According to Autry, all of his initiatives, from Tesla to SpaceX to the Boring Company,
have highly ambitious time limits and typically take considerably longer than planned. "That
should not diminish either his ability to set an aggressive deadline or the greatness
of what he finally achieves," he added.
Musk announced in January 2020 that he intends to transport one million people to Mars by
2050. This entails constructing 1,000 Starship rockets over ten years - that's 100 Starships
each year - and launching three Starships per day on average. "There will be a lot of
employment opportunities on Mars!".
Despite the fact that the Starship rocket has been tried and tested, Autry noted that
the booster, life support system, reentry system, and capacity to refuel on Mars are
yet to be tested - and some haven't even been built. This means that developing technology
beyond Starship to maintain a society on Mars will most likely take longer.
Musk's lofty goals are the result of a combination of motivating charm, planning fallacy, and
being "ubercapable of getting things done."
The only way to travel to Mars quicker is to build a spaceship with a propeller motor
that is far faster than the raptor engine, and what might that be? Let us find out.
To travel to Mars, SpaceX's starship will need a lot of fuel, and storing enough of
it may be difficult, it will even alter the weight and proportion magnitude of the starship.
Musk's plan is to create starships that can store fuel in orbit, but the process of transporting
enough fuel to the stations is complex. What if Elon Musk chooses to convert from rocket
propellant to solar sails for the starship to make it move incredibly fast?
The obstacles are tremendous, and there is the expense to consider, since space exploration
is prohibitively expensive, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
The technological difficulty of actually creating a starship capable of reaching Mars is quite
complex; consider the fuel required to power the ship to Mars.
The shortest distance between earth and mars is about 33.9 million miles, but this happens
on occasion. For instance, it took the Mariner 228 days to reach mars from earth, that this
flight happened around 1965.
The mariner 6 did much better with 155 days on another flight, four years later the next
mariner spent 128 days and route the same year the shortest on record the first american
spacecraft, the viking one cruised for 304 days to reach mars while the viking 2 took
a whopping 333 days a few days short of a whole year more recently the mars odyssey
took a total of 200 days to reach mars in 2001.
But the most recent arrival to Mars, the perseverance, stayed for seven months and covered a total
of 293 million miles before departing at an incredible 24 600 miles per hour.
Keep in mind that cargo-carrying starships are making the journey ahead of people so
that Mars can be more hospitable when humans arrive; that's a lot of weight to blast to
and transport through space.
Aside from the massive quantity of fuel necessary, the spaceship will require a different type
of fuel known as methylox, which is methane plus oxygen, and it will require a lot of
it. To make matters more complicated, each spaceship requires massive quantities of fuel
to escape the earth's gravitational pull, and its fuel will be depleted by the time
it reaches Earth's orbit.
Don't forget that each of these starship fuel tanks must escape gravity on its own, which
requires a significant amount of work, and what if Musk decides to alter things up and
utilize a different form of propulsion for the starship.
The use of solar sails is a technique of propelling a spaceship across space that does not need
the use of a fuel or becoming nuclear, and it might work for the starship.
Musk's spacecraft will basically use the sun's energy to move away from the sun. It works
like this – if you've ever seen boats moving on water, the wind pushes the sails attached
to it; the same principle applies here; attach sails large enough to the starship, and photons
from the sun's rays will hit the sails, propelling the starship forward. Photons do not have
mass, but their high speed gives them momentum, which can cause them to move the objects they
collide with.
This indicates that if the sails on the spaceship have enough surface area, they will potentially
propel the starship forward, but how large would the sails have to be to function for
the starship?
We're looking at the size of a football pitch, and everything will be very large where the
starship is concerned but as long as it is large enough the starship will move towards
mars.
The solar sails are particularly great as they are more environmentally friendly for
anybody that is concerned with preserving the environment from pollution out there in
space.
The starship may not be able to achieve that insane speed due to its weight, but it will
certainly move quickly. It is worth noting that Bill Nye, the popular American science
dude, specifically mentioned Mars when touting the benefits of solar sails, saying the technology
could one day help deliver cargo to Mars.
Interestingly, the precursor of the starship has been active in solar sail initiatives.
The planetary society, founded by space celebrity Carl Sagan and now led by Bill Nye, his former
pupil, spearheaded the campaign to bring the LightSail 2 into operation.
The first spacecraft in orbit driven purely by solar sails, SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket,
was used to launch another spacecraft, the proxy one, which also carried the light sail.
After detaching the proxy 1, the lightsail 2 was launched into orbit.
The launch was regarded by Musk as the most difficult yet for his firm up to that time.
The lightsail 2 was essentially a demonstration ship; it is the size of a loaf of bread and
weighs around 11 pounds when fully unfolded. The surface area of two sails is 344 square
feet. The sails are composed of a durable tear resistant material called mylar and are
covered with highly luminous pigments.
The light sail 2 has components that allow it to detect where the sun's rays are strongest
and take advantage of them.
If Musk was paying attention during the launch, he could have already considered constructing
it on the starship, which might address the problem of the starship running out of fuel
on one of the longest human-made journeys.
Right now, what we cannot really tell much about is if the solar sail propel the cargo
starship, owning how heavy this type of space vehicle could be.
What are your thoughts on solar sail technology? Do you think it's a feasible way for a starship
to reach Mars in a matter of weeks?
Please do well to share your thoughts in the comment section below. Until next time, please
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