Elon Musk Wants Giant SpaceX Spaceship to Fly People to Mars by 2024
SpaceX aims to launch its first cargo mission to Mars in 2022 and send people toward the Red Planet just two years after that.
Those are just two of the highlights of the company's current Mars-colonization plan, which SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk unveiled early Friday morning EDT (Sept. 29) at the 68th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia.
Musk's talk — which took place Friday afternoon local Adelaide time — served to update the architecture the billionaire entrepreneur revealed at last year's IAC, in Guadalajara, Mexico. That previous presentation introduced a huge, reusable rocket-spaceship combo called the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), which Musk envisioned helping to establish a million-person city on Mars within the next 50 to 100 years. [ The BFR: SpaceX's Mars-Colonization Architecture in Images]
As Musk described it last year, the roughly 40-foot-wide (12 meters) ITS booster would feature 42 Raptor engines . It would launch the spaceship to Earth orbit, then come back down to its pad for a pinpoint landing — and another flight in quick succession. The spaceship, meanwhile, would be fueled in orbit by a tanker (which would also be launched by an ITS booster).
https://www.space.com/38313-elon-musk-spacex-fly-people-to-mars-2024.html
Tags
Who is online
90 visitors
Pretty fast if this takes place for real.
I see they will be sending up a fueling station first which is a good idea, but they should take it a step further and send fueling and supplies to orbit Mars also this would make it a lighter faster ship and a faster trip, because you don't need to haul your return fuel with you.
If I could only live to the age my paternal great-grandfather reached still having his strength and marbles, I would love dearly to see the day that such a venture would be a success.
Yes, long and healthy life is true blessing worth longing for. I know I for one look forward to the same thing, long and happy life. Wouldn't be much fun to suffer from day to day though for a long time.
I'm sure that by 30's if not sooner this Mars thing is reality, and I'd say it's totally worth the money.