Yesterday at the International Astronautical
Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, billionaire
and visionary space entrepreneur Elon Musk
announced a detailed plan for putting humans
on Mars.
While it's quite ambitious and entails some
unorthodox but surprisingly realistic ideas,
the fact that it comes from Elon Musk, the
founder of SpaceX, is significant.
There seems to be every indication that he's
going to make it happen.
If his past activities are any indicator,
this is not pie in the sky dreaming but could
become reality.
You see, he's said all along that he founded
SpaceX with the specific end game of going
to Mars in mind.
And now, years later, SpaceX is no lightweight
start up.
And now he has a coherent plan for going to
Mars.
What was notable about his talk was that Musk
revealed a lot of specifics about the engineering
and science of just how his company is going
to do this, to the point of delving into the
function and testing of a rather impressive
carbon fiber fuel tank SpaceX built for the
project and even detailed his concerns about
going to Mars himself due to the fact that
he wants to make sure his company doesn't
end up under the control of for-profit investors
should he die in an accident.
At the very least, Elon and SpaceX has gone
"all in" with this one.
Step one of the plan is to build a suitable
rocket.
This involves an intermediate step.
SpaceX's plan to develop a rocket that can
take us to Mars has been in the works for
some time.
Known as the Falcon Heavy, this rocket has
been designed from the outset to carry humans
and will be fully capable as a super heavy
lift launch system that can reach the Moon
or Mars.
In addition, it can carry significantly larger
payloads into low earth orbit than we can
with current rockets, to the tune of 54,400
kilograms.
The first launch of one of these rockets,
which really are a modified version of the
Falcon 9 rocket, is expected in early 2017.
That's not long from now, and it ushers in
a new age of successive very large rockets
including NASA's Space Launch System or SLS,
which will surpass even the venerable Saturn
V of Apollo fame, but Musk intends to outdo
even that.
So very soon, at least, we will once again
have the capability of sending humans beyond
low earth orbit.
Congratulations to SpaceX and NASA indeed.
But Musk's plan doesn't stop there.
Musk's timetable to go from the first launch
of a Falcon Heavy to landing a human on Mars
is about ten years.
Now, one possible snag with his plan is funding.
He envisions a sort of public and private
mix of funding sources, but these have not
yet been fully secured.
There are many ways he can do this, including
crowd sourcing and using his own assets and
money along with the profits from SpaceX.
That might seem a stretch but on the other
hand, it's Elon Musk and he's shown a certain
ability to get things done.
Using the Falcon Heavy, the plan initially
entails sending research spacecraft to Mars
based on the Dragon design.
Windows to launch to Mars which aligns with
earth favorably every 26 months will each
see a spacecraft launch starting with the
first in 2018, less than two years from now.
These missions will collect data needed for
landing humans on Mars and moving to the next
step.
But then it gets crazy.
If SpaceX is successful, which while skeptical
I certainly hope they are, this plan is no
simple hop over to Mars to take a look around
and leave.
Musk's plan is far more ambitious.
Shockingly so.
In Guadalajara, he laid out plans for an all
out self-sustaining colony and gave engineering
specifics about an even larger rocket and
spacecraft to be launched in 2022 that is
specifically designed to found a permanent,
self-sustaining colony on Mars that could
result in millions of people living on that
planet terraforming it into a second earth.
Elon Musk wants to make us into a multiple
planet species, and that's quite an ambitious
goal indeed, but also sensible if he can make
it happen.
This larger rocket and spacecraft is called
the Interplanetary Transport System and it
appears that SpaceX has already completed
much of the design work.
This is an unbelievably titanic launch system
designed to carry 100 people and all of their
supplies, gear, and separately the fuel needed
to get to Mars.
How the system works is relatively straightforward.
The manned spacecraft launches atop a reusable
stage that carries it into a parking orbit.
Then the rocket stage returns to earth to
pick up a similar spacecraft adapted for refueling
the manned spacecraft.
Shortly after being mounted on the same first
stage, the fueling spacecraft launches again
delivering its payload to the manned spacecraft.
It then loads the fuel onboard, returns to
earth, and the manned spacecraft disembarks
for Mars.
Once it arrives, it will enter the Martian
atmosphere using a heat shield, then flip
around and fire a landing rocket carrying
it safely to the Martian surface.
Once landed, the humans will disembark and
set up a colony and a fuel depot.
This depot would manufacture fuel on Mars
to relaunch the spacecraft and return it to
earth to be used to pick up more passengers
and transport them to Mars, along with anyone
with cold feet that wished to return home.
All the while, SpaceX will build more spacecraft
and launch systems ultimately allowing for
large numbers of people to go to Mars to colonize,
build businesses, create a city on Mars and
eventually make it self-sustaining.
His time table for this is between 40 to 100
years before a self-sustaining colony can
be established using a fleet of as many as
1000 of these spacecraft.
He envisions it how the west of the United
States was colonized.
California, for example, was a sparsely populated
frontier until the Union Pacific Railroad
was built, and now it's one of the main centers
of American culture and population.
The existence of the railroad was pivotal
in establishing that, and Musk believes that
his Martian transport system will serve a
similar role.
There were people that didn't believe in the
construction of the railroad at the time,
arguing that very few people lived in California
and there was no point.
They turned out to be epically wrong.
Might that happen with Mars too?
Well, part of that question will be resolved
with costs.
If it's expensive to go to Mars, then it's
not going to happen other than an international
government project to send a few astronauts
to set foot there, pat ourselves on the back
and then leave.
But if it's cheap, then that changes the equation.
Musk claims that his system will allow a person
to relocate to Mars for less than $100,000
U.S. dollars.
That sounds expensive, but it's very cheap
compared to going to the International Space
Station.
In 2001 multimillionaire Dennis Tito went
to the ISS and had to pay the Russians 20
million dollars for a week's vacation.
In comparison, a hundred grand is so cheap
that it could make sense for business people
wishing to make money from resources on Mars
or selling pizzas there.
In short, SpaceX's plan is to simply provide
the transport.
They want to be the railroad.
Humans will found the colony as they will
using Mars's natural resources.
These are pretty good, actually, at least
for founding the colony.
There's no shortage of water on Mars, ice
is everywhere that can be melted.
Further, the planet's atmosphere is mostly
carbon dioxide, which means oxygen can be
extracted from it.
There's also some nitrogen there, and soil
that almost certainly can be used to grow
food.
But can you make money from residing on Mars?
That remains to be seen.
But the Interplanetary Transport System isn't
just limited to Mars.
By building a fuel production depot at Mars,
essentially a gas station, a manned mission
to Jupiter becomes possible.
By locating another depot on the moon Europa,
then Saturn comes into play.
By building a depot at Enceladus, you can
go even further.
This system is designed to allow humans to
physically go literally anywhere in our solar
system.
That's an amazing idea if you think about
it, given that today we can't leave earth
orbit with manned missions.
As an aside, Musk mentioned another interesting
possibility.
To generate money for his endeavour, he explored
the possibility of using the ITS for transporting
goods on earth.
If you were in New York and had a load of
tomatoes that you really wanted to get to
Paris very quickly, the ITS rocket could certainly
do it.
It could theoretically cross the Atlantic
in less than 15 minutes.
It would be a very expensive batch of tomatoes
to deliver, but needless to say that such
speeds, if there is a market for them, would
prove very useful for the human race and very
different from what we have now.
And Musk intends to accomplish this within
just a few years.
So once a colony on Mars is established, what
will it be like?
I'll leave that for a future video as Elon
Musk's plan develops, but I hope we do it
with better planning than we did here on Earth.
I'm confidant we will, and maybe some day
as the cultures of the two planets diverge
we will learn from them as they learned from
us.
Thanks for listening, I am futurist and science
fiction author John Michael Godier currently
excited and feeling supportive of Elon Musk
which is why I'm playing Bach as background
music instead of the usual dark spacey music.
I wish him well, and I'm ready to go to Mars
and be sure to check out my books at your
favorite online book retailer and subscribe
to my channel for in-depth, regular explorations
into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects
of this amazing universe in which we live.
