In a long-awaited presentation Tuesday, SpaceX founder Elon Musk unveiled a grandiose, long-range plan for building reusable super boosters and huge spaceships to eventually carry tens of thousands of people to Mars and elsewhere in the solar system with the eventual goal of building self-sustaining colonies.
Mars is, of course, the near-term target, with SpaceX launching an upgraded Dragon spacecraft to the red planet in 2018, an unpiloted mission to gain flight experience while designing, building and testing the more advanced boosters, spacecraft and subsystems needed for his Interplanetary Transport System.
The ultimate goal is a gargantuan 400-foot-tall rocket that would boost large crew capsules into low-Earth orbit that would then be fueled for the voyage to Mars by the same reusable rocket carrying up unpiloted propellant tankers.
The cost of sending an astronaut to Mars using the Apollo moon mission architecture in today’s dollars would be around $10 billion per ticket, Musk said. Using his new rocket, spacecraft and economies of scale, Musk hopes to get the cost down to around $200,000 a ticket -- the median cost of a new home in the United States -- while carrying 450 tons to the surface of Mars per flight.
The keys, he said, are fully reusable rockets and crew ships; autonomous orbital fueling technology; using the most efficient propellants; and producing those propellants on Mars to get the crew ships back to Earth for additional flights.
“There are really two fundamental paths,” Musk told an overflow crowd at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. “One path is we stay on Earth forever, and there will be some eventual extinction event. ... The alternative is to become a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species.
“That’s what we want,” he said, pointing to a large picture of Mars on a screen behind him. “So how do we figure out how to take you to Mars and create a self-sustaining city, a city that’s not really an outpost but could become a planet in its own right and thus we could become a truly multi-planet species.”
In a detailed video, Musk showed off the system SpaceX engineers have been quietly designing.
Up to 100 or so astronauts -- pretty much anyone who wants to go and can afford a ticket, he said -- would board the Interplanetary Transport System spacecraft at launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. SpaceX is already modifying the retired shuttle pad for use by the company’s Falcon 9 and more powerful Falcon Heavy rockets.
The huge 39-foot-wide booster would blast off using 42 high-power SpaceX-designed Raptor engines burning liquid oxygen and cryogenic methane, generating a combined 28.7 million pounds of thrust.
That’s nearly four times the 7.5 million pounds of thrust generated by NASA’s legendary Saturn 5 moon rocket and three times more than the most powerful version of the Space Launch System rocket NASA is currently developing for its own Mars flights.
The SpaceX rocket would first boost the cone-shaped 162-foot-long Interplanetary Transport System vehicle into orbit, then return to Earth for a landing on the same pad. An identical looking tanker ship loaded with propellants then would be mounted atop the booster and launched into orbit to rendezvous with the ITS spaceship.
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