Elon Musk and SpaceX's Plan for Mars

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.

Musk described this spacecraft as fun. It certainly appears spacious, even if carrying a hundred people. But he envisioned that it might have a restaurant, quarters, and all manner of comforts making it seem more like a cruise ship than a spacecraft.

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.