SpaceX founder wants to build a colony on Mars
NASA artist's concept depicts astronauts on the red planet. / NASA
Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip.
In Musk's vision, the ambitious Mars settlement program would start with a pioneering group of fewer than 10 people, who would journey to the Red Planet aboard a huge reusable rocket powered by liquid oxygen and methane.
"At Mars, you can start a self-sustaining civilization and grow it into something really big," Musk told an audience at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London on Friday (Nov. 16). Musk was there to talk about his business plans, and to receive the Society's gold medal for his contribution to the commercialization of space.
Mars pioneers
Accompanying the founders of the new Mars colony would be large amounts of equipment, including machines to produce fertilizer, methane and oxygen from Mars' atmospheric nitrogen and carbon dioxide and the planet's subsurface water ice.
The Red Planet pioneers would also take construction materials to build transparent domes, which when pressurized with Mars' atmospheric CO2 could grow Earth crops in Martian soil. As the Mars colony became more self sufficient, the big rocket would start to transport more people and fewer supplies and equipment. [Future Visions of Human Spaceflight]
Musk's architecture for this human Mars exploration effort does not employ cyclers, reusable spacecraft that would travel back and forth constantly between the Red Planet and Earth -- at least not at first
"Probably not a Mars cycler; the thing with the cyclers is, you need a lot of them," Musk told SPACE.com. "You have to have propellant to keep things aligned as [Mars and Earth's] orbits aren't [always] in the same plane. In the beginning you won't have cyclers."
Musk also ruled out SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which the company is developing to ferry astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit, as the spacecraft that would land colonists on the Red Planet. When asked by SPACE.com what vehicle would be used, he said, "I think you just land the entire thing."
Asked if the "entire thing" is the huge new reusable rocket -- which is rumored to bear the acronymic name MCT, short for Mass Cargo Transport or Mars Colony Transport -- Musk said, "Maybe."
Musk has been thinking about what his colonist-carrying spacecraft would need, whatever it ends up being. He reckons the oxygen concentration inside should be 30 to 40 percent, and he envisions using the spacecraft's liquid water store as a barrier between the Mars pioneers and the sun.
A $500,000 ticket
Musk's $500,000 ticket price for a Mars trip was derived from what he thinks is affordable.
"The ticket price needs to 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," he said, comparing the purchase to buying a house in California. [Photos: The First Space Tourists]
He also estimated that of the eight billion humans that will be living on Earth by the time the colony is possible, perhaps one in 100,000 would be prepared to go. That equates to potentially 80,000 migrants.
Musk figures the colony program -- which he wants to be a collaboration between government and private enterprise -- would end up costing about $36 billion. He arrived at that number by estimating that a colony that costs 0.25 percent or 0.5 percent of a nation's gross domestic product (GDP) would be considered acceptable.
The United States' GDP in 2010 was $14.5 trillion; 0.25 percent of $14.5 trillion is $36 billion. If all 80,000 colonists paid $500,000 per seat for their Mars trip, $40 billion would be raised.
"Some money has to be spent on establishing a base on Mars. It's about getting the basic fundamentals in place," Musk said. "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."
The big reusable rocket
The fully reusable rocket that Musk wants to take colonists to Mars is an evolution of SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster, which launches Dragon.
"It's going to be much bigger [than Falcon 9], but I don't think we're quite ready to state the payload. We'll speak about that next year," Musk said, emphasizing that only fully reusable rockets and spacecraft would keep the ticket price for Mars migration as low as $500,000.
SpaceX is already testing what Musk calls a next-generation, reusable Falcon 9 rocket that can take off vertically and land vertically. The prototype, called Grasshopper, is a Falcon 9 first stage with landing legs.
Grasshoper has made two short flights. The first was on Sept. 21 and reached a height of 6 feet; the second test, on Nov. 1, was to a height of 17.7 feet. A planned milestone for the Grasshopper project is to reach an altitude of 100 feet. [Grasshopper Rocket's 2-Story Test Flight (Video)]
"Over the next few months, we'll gradually increase the altitude and speed," Musk said. "I do think there probably will be some craters along the way; we'll be very lucky if there are no craters. Vertical landing is an extremely important breakthrough -- extreme, rapid reusability. It's as close to aircraft-like dispatch capability as one can achieve."
Musk wants to have a reusable Falcon 9 first stage, which uses Grasshopper technology, come back from orbit in "the next year or two." He then wants to use this vertical-landing technology for Falcon 9's upper stage.
Musk hopes to have a fully reusable version of Falcon 9 in five or six years, but he acknowledged that those could be "famous last words."
A rocket stepping stone
Another stepping stone toward the planned reusable Mars rocket is SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launcher. With a first flight planned for next year from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, the Heavy is a Falcon 9 that has two Falcon 9 first stages bolted on either side.
Musk expects the Falcon Heavy to launch from Florida's Cape Canaveral eventually. This triple-first-stage rocket will be able to put 116,600 pounds into a 124-mile low-Earth orbit. But the Falcon Heavy is still much smaller than Musk's fully reusable Mars rocket, which will also employ a new engine.
While Musk declines to state what the Mars rocket's payload capability will be, he does say it will use a new staged combustion cycle engine called Raptor. The cycle involves two steps. Propellant -- the fuel and oxidizer -- is ignited in pre-burners to produce hot high-pressure gases that help pump propellant into the engine's combustion chamber. The hot gases are then directed into the same chamber to aid in the combustion of the propellants.
Because Raptor is a staged combustion engine -- like the main engines of NASA's now-retired space shuttle fleet -- it is expected to be far more efficient than the open-cycle Merlin engines used by the Falcon 9.
While the Falcon 9's engines use liquid oxygen (LOX) and kerosene, Raptor will use LOX and methane. Musk explained that "the energy cost of methane is the lowest, and it has a slight ISP [specific impulse] advantage over kerosene and doesn't have any of the bad aspects of hydrogen." (Hydrogen is difficult to store at cryogenic temperatures, makes metal brittle and is very flammable.)
Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+.
- The Boldest Mars Missions in History
- SpaceX's Quest For Rocketry's Holy Grail - SPACE.com Exclusive Video
- Special Report: The Private Space Taxi Race
Copyright 2012 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Popular in SciTech
- Oops! The five greatest scientific blunders
- Apple's next iPhone may be coming in June
- Zynga demands employees return stock or get fired
- Thousands online proclaim: Jahar Tsarnaev is innocent
- 40 years later: Why the Endangered Species Act still matters
- Beam this up: Creating the sounds of "Star Trek"
- Alternatives to Google Reader
- Google security: you (still) are the weakest link
I suspect there is plenty for manned missions to do within the 25 day range of the Orion crew module. To date, mankind has not left earth orbit and people are talking about such grand things as colonizing Mars.
A station outside earth orbit. Can we keep people in relatively good health for a period of 5 years without a return to earth and without (necessary) visits from supply ships?
A station in lunar orbit. What is there to see and can we make a permanent colony happen? Can we develop technology that improves our chances?
Can we build ships capable of round trip visits to Mars that could have carried astronauts (ie. sufficient payload to carry a crew module, supplies, life support, etc...).
Can we detect space debris from a spacecraft and maneuver the spacecraft to avoid it? On route to Mars, ground based telescopes are not an option. A lot has changed since digital cameras and computers became cheap, but it still sounds complicated. Your life depends on success. Unmanned probes are more expendable than manned missions.
While I am glad that SpaceX exists, it does not represent the "privatization of space" when there is only a single private company out there producing rockets. Sounds to me more like the "monopolization of space"
Elon Musk is a big dreamer but anyone can dream big when they have a lot of money. And his money with Space X has come from the American taxpayers. It isn't because he's selling a product that is wanted by consumers, it's because he's selling a product that's wanted by a 'single' customer - a government. So, has space really been privatized? Seems to me that Space X is just the flea on the back of the government dog.
And pork driven Nasa leaves itself incompetent and incapable of crewing or even resupplying our own space station...
Private enterprise like SpaceX can save the US space program from our parasitic, greedy Federal Govt agency incompetence....
We need not waste another 4 decades...we were fools to entrust the US space program to our corrupt, greedy, incompetent Federal Govt.