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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: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 18 2017, @05:06PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday June 18 2017, @05:06PM (#527525)

    Try this math on for size: Say the program costs $350B, because nobody ever hits their cost targets. It's also going to run for 20+ years, at least 10 launch cycles, probably more, but let's stop at 20. $350B is $1000 from every citizen of the USA, and it's also spread over 20 years, so that's around-about $1 per week from every US citizen in "Mars tax."

    The current US defense budget is around $600B PER YEAR, or closer to $1700 per citizen, or $33 per week.

    Me, personally, if there were a reasonable 20 year plan to get 1 million people to Mars (alive, and self-sustaining), I'd certainly approve a 3% rollback in US defense spending for that. If we can get the EU, Japan, South Korea and a few others in on the game, it can probably be more like a 2% rollback, if not - then we've got a 100% US based colony on Mars, doing who knows what for weapons development, within 50 years they can probably be precision-dropping asteroids on "trouble spots" around Earth.

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