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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 Sunday June 18 2017, @01:45AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 18 2017, @01:45AM (#527261)

    Interesting that it is 0.1 bar since that is also approximate tropopause pressure throughout the solar system. Why there in this case?

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 18 2017, @03:16AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday June 18 2017, @03:16AM (#527297) Journal

    Interesting that it is 0.1 bar since that is also approximate tropopause pressure throughout the solar system. Why there in this case?

    Coincidence. Both require low pressure for different reasons. The Hyperloop requires low pressure because that means less air to push around the vehicle and hence, less drag. The tropopause is an abrupt change in thermal gradient from cooling to warming that comes about because the atmosphere absorbs UV from sunlight, heating it up as one goes up in the atmosphere where there is more UV to absorb. The tropopause is the layer with the highest energy balance radiated to space. Both above and below have a lower energy balance radiated to space and hence a higher temperature.