Teh One Who Knocks
11-27-2012, 12:09 PM
By Damon Poeter - PC Magazine
http://i.imgur.com/WScar.jpg
SpaceX only recently pulled off its first big joint venture with NASA—ferrying equipment to the International Space Station aboard the private spaceflight company's unmanned Dragon spacecraft and winning a multi-flight contract with the space agency—but co-founder and CEO Elon Musk isn't resting on his laurels.
Instead, the billionaire South African entrepreneur already has his eyes on a bigger prize—Mars.
Musk has recently been making the rounds to drum up support for an audacious plan to establish a colony on the Red Planet, which to date has only been visited by robotic probes like NASA's Curiosity rover. Earlier this month, he pitched his vision of a Mars colony inhabited by as many as 80,000 people at a meeting of the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS) in London, according to Space.com.
"At Mars, you can start a self-sustaining civilization and grow it into something really big," Musk told members of the RaeS, which in mid-November presented Musk with an award for his contributions to the privatization of spaceflight.
Musk said the Martian settlement he envisioned would start small, with just a handful of founding members, but could grow its population to the tens of thousands with SpaceX and its backers charging the next wave of colonists something like half a million dollars for the privilege of traveling aboard a heavy reusable rocket to the Mars colony.
The project would be designed to make the settlement increasingly self-sufficient over time, Musk said. He described the transport of "large amounts of equipment, including machines to produce fertilizer, methane, and oxygen from Mars's atmospheric nitrogen and carbon dioxide and the planet's subsurface water ice," Space.com reported.
The colonists would also build "transparent domes, which when pressurized with Mars's atmospheric CO2 could grow Earth crops in Martian soil," according to the site.
The project would also require a brand-new spacecraft from SpaceX, he said. Though the company is currently repurposing its reusable Dragon capsule to be able to carry astronauts to low-Earth orbit and splash down in our home planet's oceans, Musk described a new kind of interplanetary transport craft capable of landing on the rocky soil of Mars.
In fact, SpaceX is already testing a prototype variation of the Falcon 9 booster it uses to launch the Dragon into low orbit called Grasshopper which has landing gear. Grasshopper made successful test flights on Sept. 21 and Nov. 1, Space.com noted, though it only reached heights of six feet and just under 18 feet in those trials.
Another rocket SpaceX is working on, a larger version of the Falcon 9 called the Falcon Heavy, was described by the site as a "stepping stone" to the eventual "MCT," shorthand for the "Mass Cargo Transport" or "Mars Colony Transport," that Space.com believes the company is developing. Musk said such a future rocket would be "much bigger [than the Falcon 9], but I don't think we're quite ready to state the payload. We'll speak about that next year."
He also told the site that SpaceX was pushing ahead with testing for Grasshopper on a fairly aggressive schedule.
"Over the next few months, we'll gradually increase the altitude and speed. I do think there probably will be some craters along the way; we'll be very lucky if there are no craters," he told the site, adding, "Vertical landing is an extremely important breakthrough—extreme, rapid reusability. It's as close to aircraft-like dispatch capability as one can achieve."
Musk didn't say the $500,000 ticket price for a trip to the Mars colony was set in stone, but argued that such a fee should be "low enough that most people in advanced countries, in their mid-forties or something like that, could put together enough money to make the trip."
The SpaceX founder figured that perhaps one in 100,000 people on Earth would be prepared to help found a colony on another planet, meaning about 80,000 out of a population of 8 billion would be candidates for the trip to Mars.
At $500,000 a ticket, the Mars colony would have $40 billion on hand if all of those potential colonists signed up and paid up. That's $4 billion more than the $36 billion Musk said he thought it would cost to get the colony up and running, but he also figures public money would be needed for the initial investment in the project.
"Some money has to be spent on establishing a base on Mars. It's about getting the basic fundamentals in place," he told Space.com.
"That was true of the English colonies [in the Americas]; it took a significant expense to get things started. But once there are regular Mars flights, you can get the cost down to half a million dollars for someone to move to Mars. Then I think there are enough people who would buy that to have it be a reasonable business case."
http://i.imgur.com/WScar.jpg
SpaceX only recently pulled off its first big joint venture with NASA—ferrying equipment to the International Space Station aboard the private spaceflight company's unmanned Dragon spacecraft and winning a multi-flight contract with the space agency—but co-founder and CEO Elon Musk isn't resting on his laurels.
Instead, the billionaire South African entrepreneur already has his eyes on a bigger prize—Mars.
Musk has recently been making the rounds to drum up support for an audacious plan to establish a colony on the Red Planet, which to date has only been visited by robotic probes like NASA's Curiosity rover. Earlier this month, he pitched his vision of a Mars colony inhabited by as many as 80,000 people at a meeting of the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS) in London, according to Space.com.
"At Mars, you can start a self-sustaining civilization and grow it into something really big," Musk told members of the RaeS, which in mid-November presented Musk with an award for his contributions to the privatization of spaceflight.
Musk said the Martian settlement he envisioned would start small, with just a handful of founding members, but could grow its population to the tens of thousands with SpaceX and its backers charging the next wave of colonists something like half a million dollars for the privilege of traveling aboard a heavy reusable rocket to the Mars colony.
The project would be designed to make the settlement increasingly self-sufficient over time, Musk said. He described the transport of "large amounts of equipment, including machines to produce fertilizer, methane, and oxygen from Mars's atmospheric nitrogen and carbon dioxide and the planet's subsurface water ice," Space.com reported.
The colonists would also build "transparent domes, which when pressurized with Mars's atmospheric CO2 could grow Earth crops in Martian soil," according to the site.
The project would also require a brand-new spacecraft from SpaceX, he said. Though the company is currently repurposing its reusable Dragon capsule to be able to carry astronauts to low-Earth orbit and splash down in our home planet's oceans, Musk described a new kind of interplanetary transport craft capable of landing on the rocky soil of Mars.
In fact, SpaceX is already testing a prototype variation of the Falcon 9 booster it uses to launch the Dragon into low orbit called Grasshopper which has landing gear. Grasshopper made successful test flights on Sept. 21 and Nov. 1, Space.com noted, though it only reached heights of six feet and just under 18 feet in those trials.
Another rocket SpaceX is working on, a larger version of the Falcon 9 called the Falcon Heavy, was described by the site as a "stepping stone" to the eventual "MCT," shorthand for the "Mass Cargo Transport" or "Mars Colony Transport," that Space.com believes the company is developing. Musk said such a future rocket would be "much bigger [than the Falcon 9], but I don't think we're quite ready to state the payload. We'll speak about that next year."
He also told the site that SpaceX was pushing ahead with testing for Grasshopper on a fairly aggressive schedule.
"Over the next few months, we'll gradually increase the altitude and speed. I do think there probably will be some craters along the way; we'll be very lucky if there are no craters," he told the site, adding, "Vertical landing is an extremely important breakthrough—extreme, rapid reusability. It's as close to aircraft-like dispatch capability as one can achieve."
Musk didn't say the $500,000 ticket price for a trip to the Mars colony was set in stone, but argued that such a fee should be "low enough that most people in advanced countries, in their mid-forties or something like that, could put together enough money to make the trip."
The SpaceX founder figured that perhaps one in 100,000 people on Earth would be prepared to help found a colony on another planet, meaning about 80,000 out of a population of 8 billion would be candidates for the trip to Mars.
At $500,000 a ticket, the Mars colony would have $40 billion on hand if all of those potential colonists signed up and paid up. That's $4 billion more than the $36 billion Musk said he thought it would cost to get the colony up and running, but he also figures public money would be needed for the initial investment in the project.
"Some money has to be spent on establishing a base on Mars. It's about getting the basic fundamentals in place," he told Space.com.
"That was true of the English colonies [in the Americas]; it took a significant expense to get things started. But once there are regular Mars flights, you can get the cost down to half a million dollars for someone to move to Mars. Then I think there are enough people who would buy that to have it be a reasonable business case."