Yesterday at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, billionaire
and visionary space entrepreneur Elon Musk announced a detailed plan for putting humans
on Mars.
While it's quite ambitious and entails some unorthodox but surprisingly realistic ideas,
the fact that it comes from Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, is significant.
There seems to be every indication that he's going to make it happen.
If his past activities are any indicator, this is not pie in the sky dreaming but could
become reality.
You see, he's said all along that he founded SpaceX with the specific end game of going
to Mars in mind.
And now, years later, SpaceX is no lightweight start up.
And now he has a coherent plan for going to Mars.
What was notable about his talk was that Musk revealed a lot of specifics about the engineering
and science of just how his company is going to do this, to the point of delving into the
function and testing of a rather impressive carbon fiber fuel tank SpaceX built for the
project and even detailed his concerns about going to Mars himself due to the fact that
he wants to make sure his company doesn't end up under the control of for-profit investors
should he die in an accident.
At the very least, Elon and SpaceX has gone "all in" with this one.
Step one of the plan is to build a suitable rocket.
This involves an intermediate step.
SpaceX's plan to develop a rocket that can take us to Mars has been in the works for
some time.
Known as the Falcon Heavy, this rocket has been designed from the outset to carry humans
and will be fully capable as a super heavy lift launch system that can reach the Moon
or Mars.
In addition, it can carry significantly larger payloads into low earth orbit than we can
with current rockets, to the tune of 54,400 kilograms.
The first launch of one of these rockets, which really are a modified version of the
Falcon 9 rocket, is expected in early 2017.
That's not long from now, and it ushers in a new age of successive very large rockets
including NASA's Space Launch System or SLS, which will surpass even the venerable Saturn
V of Apollo fame, but Musk intends to outdo even that.
So very soon, at least, we will once again have the capability of sending humans beyond
low earth orbit.
Congratulations to SpaceX and NASA indeed.
But Musk's plan doesn't stop there.
Musk's timetable to go from the first launch of a Falcon Heavy to landing a human on Mars
is about ten years.
Now, one possible snag with his plan is funding.
He envisions a sort of public and private mix of funding sources, but these have not
yet been fully secured.
There are many ways he can do this, including crowd sourcing and using his own assets and
money along with the profits from SpaceX.
That might seem a stretch but on the other hand, it's Elon Musk and he's shown a certain
ability to get things done.
Using the Falcon Heavy, the plan initially entails sending research spacecraft to Mars
based on the Dragon design.
Windows to launch to Mars which aligns with earth favorably every 26 months will each
see a spacecraft launch starting with the first in 2018, less than two years from now.
These missions will collect data needed for landing humans on Mars and moving to the next
step.
But then it gets crazy.
If SpaceX is successful, which while skeptical I certainly hope they are, this plan is no
simple hop over to Mars to take a look around and leave.
Musk's plan is far more ambitious.
Shockingly so.
In Guadalajara, he laid out plans for an all out self-sustaining colony and gave engineering
specifics about an even larger rocket and spacecraft to be launched in 2022 that is
specifically designed to found a permanent, self-sustaining colony on Mars that could
result in millions of people living on that planet terraforming it into a second earth.
Elon Musk wants to make us into a multiple planet species, and that's quite an ambitious
goal indeed, but also sensible if he can make it happen.
This larger rocket and spacecraft is called the Interplanetary Transport System and it
appears that SpaceX has already completed much of the design work.
This is an unbelievably titanic launch system designed to carry 100 people and all of their
supplies, gear, and separately the fuel needed to get to Mars.
How the system works is relatively straightforward.
The manned spacecraft launches atop a reusable stage that carries it into a parking orbit.
Then the rocket stage returns to earth to pick up a similar spacecraft adapted for refueling
the manned spacecraft.
Shortly after being mounted on the same first stage, the fueling spacecraft launches again
delivering its payload to the manned spacecraft.
It then loads the fuel onboard, returns to earth, and the manned spacecraft disembarks
for Mars.
Once it arrives, it will enter the Martian atmosphere using a heat shield, then flip
around and fire a landing rocket carrying it safely to the Martian surface.
Once landed, the humans will disembark and set up a colony and a fuel depot.
This depot would manufacture fuel on Mars to relaunch the spacecraft and return it to
earth to be used to pick up more passengers and transport them to Mars, along with anyone
with cold feet that wished to return home.
All the while, SpaceX will build more spacecraft and launch systems ultimately allowing for
large numbers of people to go to Mars to colonize, build businesses, create a city on Mars and
eventually make it self-sustaining.
His time table for this is between 40 to 100 years before a self-sustaining colony can
be established using a fleet of as many as 1000 of these spacecraft.
He envisions it how the west of the United States was colonized.
California, for example, was a sparsely populated frontier until the Union Pacific Railroad
was built, and now it's one of the main centers of American culture and population.
The existence of the railroad was pivotal in establishing that, and Musk believes that
his Martian transport system will serve a similar role.
There were people that didn't believe in the construction of the railroad at the time,
arguing that very few people lived in California and there was no point.
They turned out to be epically wrong.
Might that happen with Mars too?
Well, part of that question will be resolved with costs.
If it's expensive to go to Mars, then it's not going to happen other than an international
government project to send a few astronauts to set foot there, pat ourselves on the back
and then leave.
But if it's cheap, then that changes the equation.
Musk claims that his system will allow a person to relocate to Mars for less than $100,000
U.S. dollars.
That sounds expensive, but it's very cheap compared to going to the International Space
Station.
In 2001 multimillionaire Dennis Tito went to the ISS and had to pay the Russians 20
million dollars for a week's vacation.
In comparison, a hundred grand is so cheap that it could make sense for business people
wishing to make money from resources on Mars or selling pizzas there.
In short, SpaceX's plan is to simply provide the transport.
They want to be the railroad.
Humans will found the colony as they will using Mars's natural resources.
These are pretty good, actually, at least for founding the colony.
There's no shortage of water on Mars, ice is everywhere that can be melted.
Further, the planet's atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, which means oxygen can be
extracted from it.
There's also some nitrogen there, and soil that almost certainly can be used to grow
food.
But can you make money from residing on Mars?
That remains to be seen.
But the Interplanetary Transport System isn't just limited to Mars.
By building a fuel production depot at Mars, essentially a gas station, a manned mission
to Jupiter becomes possible.
By locating another depot on the moon Europa, then Saturn comes into play.
By building a depot at Enceladus, you can go even further.
This system is designed to allow humans to physically go literally anywhere in our solar
system.
That's an amazing idea if you think about it, given that today we can't leave earth
orbit with manned missions.
As an aside, Musk mentioned another interesting possibility.
To generate money for his endeavour, he explored the possibility of using the ITS for transporting
goods on earth.
If you were in New York and had a load of tomatoes that you really wanted to get to
Paris very quickly, the ITS rocket could certainly do it.
It could theoretically cross the Atlantic in less than 15 minutes.
It would be a very expensive batch of tomatoes to deliver, but needless to say that such
speeds, if there is a market for them, would prove very useful for the human race and very
different from what we have now.
And Musk intends to accomplish this within just a few years.
So once a colony on Mars is established, what will it be like?
I'll leave that for a future video as Elon Musk's plan develops, but I hope we do it
with better planning than we did here on Earth.
I'm confidant we will, and maybe some day as the cultures of the two planets diverge
we will learn from them as they learned from us.
Thanks for listening, I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently
excited and feeling supportive of Elon Musk which is why I'm playing Bach as background
music instead of the usual dark spacey music.
I wish him well, and I'm ready to go to Mars and be sure to check out my books at your
favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channel for in-depth, regular explorations
into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.