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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: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 18 2017, @03:31AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday June 18 2017, @03:31AM (#527306) Journal

    What "tiny house" do they live in on mars? Where to they plant their garden? What do they breath?

    Sounds like you're channeling Quantum Apostrophe, a notorious troll of this stuff on Slashdot. First, Mars has a land area similar to the entire Earth's non-water surface. So there's plenty of space for "tiny houses", which would, of course, be built by the people living there. Similarly, there's plenty of places for a garden to be grown and greenhouses could again be built by the people growing the food. As to what they would breathe, it'd be the same chemicals we breath on Earth. It's not hard to extract, oxygen, nitrogen, and even argon from the Martian atmosphere. One would then pressurize the habitats so that the resulting atmosphere would be at pressures that people could live at.