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posted by martyb on Saturday June 17 2017, @04:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the vision-and-a-plan dept.

Elon Musk has published a plan to colonize Mars using as many as 1,000 Interplanetary Transport System spaceships to transport a million settlers at a cost of $200,000 per person:

Elon Musk has put his Mars-colonization vision to paper, and you can read it for free.

SpaceX's billionaire founder and CEO just published the plan, which he unveiled at a conference in Mexico in September 2016, in the journal New Space. Musk's commentary, titled "Making Humanity a Multi-Planetary Species," is available for free [DOI: 10.1089/space.2017.29009.emu] [DX] on New Space's website through July 5.

"In my view, publishing this paper provides not only an opportunity for the spacefaring community to read the SpaceX vision in print with all the charts in context, but also serves as a valuable archival reference for future studies and planning," New Space editor-in-chief (and former NASA "Mars czar") Scott Hubbard wrote in a statement.

[...] ITS rockets will launch the spaceships to Earth orbit, then come back down for a pinpoint landing about 20 minutes later. And "pinpoint" is not hyperbole: "With the addition of maneuvering thrusters, we think we can actually put the booster right back on the launch stand," Musk wrote in his New Space paper, citing SpaceX's increasingly precise Falcon 9 first-stage landings.

Also at The Guardian.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:10PM (#527105)

    Surely, not even Musk expects that he's going to get everything "right" with the first plans, and the first builds.

    It may be easier when they redefine the kilogram:

    In the "New SI" four of the SI base units – namely the kilogram, the ampere, the kelvin and the mole – will be redefined in terms of constants; the new definitions will be based on fixed numerical values of the Planck constant (h), the elementary charge (e), the Boltzmann constant (kB), and the Avogadro constant (NA), respectively. Further, the definitions of all seven base units of the SI will also be uniformly expressed using the explicit-constant formulation, and specific mises en pratique will be drawn up to explain the realization of the definitions of each of the base units in a practical way.

    http://www.bipm.org/en/measurement-units/rev-si/ [bipm.org]

    If the second or speed of light (or meter) were also redefined he could get there even quicker.