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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.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday June 17 2017, @05:00PM (5 children)
By the time Musk has transported a million settlers, there will be a million and a quarter of them.
As for the expected lifetime of the rockets and spaceships - we'll have to wait and see how that pans out. The space ship is going to make 12 to 15 round trips? Possibly. But, stuff happens, too. Build one, make the round trip, then analyze the hell out of it, to see how you can improve the next generation. Fly that next generation a few times, take one out of service, and analyze it to hell and back. It's time for the NEXT GEN!!
Surely, not even Musk expects that he's going to get everything "right" with the first plans, and the first builds.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @05:57PM (1 child)
The first settlers are probably going to be retirees. People who just retired, but aren't yet old and infirm. It's likely to be a one way suicide mission, so sending people young enough to reproduce before everything is set up and stable wouldn't make any sense. On top of that, there's ethical problems about raising children in that environment that hasn't got any analog on the Earth.
They can use robots and send supplies ahead of time, but it's still going to be incredibly dangerous and I doubt that they'll send young people at first.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday June 17 2017, @06:26PM
Young people can get shit done. That is likely to defined the selection.
The problem with children is that pregnancy and development until teens may be incompatible with the wrong amount of gravity. Tests on mice has not been encouraging.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:10PM
It may be easier when they redefine the kilogram:
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.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday June 17 2017, @10:07PM (1 child)
To me that doesn't seem that hard, because its no worse than the shuttle orbiting around for decades. Yes there is a thrust phase at both ends, but that need not be all that stressful or abrupt. Most freighter ships would not even need to be manned. The passenger ships need never land.
As for his heavy lift rockets:
How is this even a worth while goal?
Click the Falcon 9 link in TFS, and click through the pictures. Compare the nice white rocket at launch to that crispy cinder that came down and landed safely. Do you REALLY think you want that hulk coming down and occupying your launch pad for the 6 months it takes to refurb it?
There simply aren't enough people who want to spend their short remaining life in a pressure suit where you can't even scratch your nose, or take a crap, only to freeze solid three weeks later. Once the "first person on mars" award is handed out, and the miserable death documented, everybody who thought they wanted to go to mars will pretty much wake up to the fact that the planet is uninhabitable by humans in its present state.
A civilization that can't stop global warming isn't going to be teraforming another planet even with the help of asteroid mining and all the other nonsense the dreamers hand wave into existence.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 18 2017, @03:25AM
That's why they would have habitats. So that Mars would be habitable without having to wear a pressure suit all the time or taking a crap in near vacuum.
We can stop global warming, we just choose not to. Let us keep in mind that just because there is a global warming problem doesn't mean that stopping it is the best solution.