The billionaire Tesla CEO and fanciful futurist discussed his ambitious vision in a speech in Adelaide, Australia, where he outlined new plans to colonize the moon, and build a city on the Red Planet.
“It’s 2017, we should have a lunar base by now,” he said at the International Astronautical Congress, the Washington Post reported. “What the hell has been going on?”
Musk drew gasps and cheers when he announced that at least two cargo ships would land on Mars in 2022, with the key mission of finding the best source of water.
“That’s not a typo,” he said, chuckling, though he acknowledged that the 2022 deadline was largely “aspirational.”
The rockets would place power, mining and life-support infrastructure on Mars to support future missions — with four ships set to ferry people, equipment and supplies to the planet in 2024.
Musk presented a revised plan Friday to build the still huge, but more reasonably sized, rocket that he dubbed BFR, a less colorful abbreviation for “Big F–king Rocket.”
The fully reusable system includes a booster stage and a spaceship capable of carrying about 100 people.
It would be able to fly people and cargo on an array of missions, from across the globe, to the International Space Station, the moon and Mars.
“If you want to get the public really fired up, I think we’ve got to have a base on the moon. That’d be pretty cool. And then going beyond there and getting people to Mars,” he said.
“That’s the continuance of the dream of Apollo that I think people are really looking for,” he said.
“I think we’ve figured out how to pay for it — this is very important,” Musk added, though he stayed away from cost estimates for the venture.
He plans to use cash flow from ongoing operations to finance his interplanetary ambitions and to leverage technology from his current boosters and vehicles, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Musk, who plans to start construction in the first half of next year, said the rocket could fly passengers anywhere on Earth in less than an hour.
Traveling at a maximum speed of more than 18,000 mph, a trip from New York to Shanghai, would take 39 minutes, he said. New York to London could be done in just 29 minutes — barely enough time for a meal and a catnap.
But travel between cities would face substantial hurdles. In addition to the technological challenges, the Federal Aviation Administration would have to approve such flights, the Washington Post reported.
Musk had previously planned to use an unmanned capsule called Red Dragon in 2018 on a mission to colonize Mars, but said SpaceX is now focused on a single, slimmer and shorter vehicle instead.
“We want to make our current vehicles redundant,” he said. “We want to have one system. If we can do that, then all the resources… can be applied to this system. I feel fairly confident that we can complete the ship and be ready for a launch in about five years.”
Musk’s speech was billed as an update to one he gave last year, in which he explained how SpaceX would make humanity a “multi-planet species.”
SpaceX’s new rocket is expected to be smaller, featuring 31 engines rather than the 47 that Musk previously announced, although it is still expedcted to carry up to 150 tons into low-Earth orbit, according to the Journal.
As before, he implicitly let NASA known that SpaceX can implement plans to reach Mars that will be quicker, cheaper and better than those being developed by the space agency or its international partners.
The caveat is that before the rockets can be used to ferry cargo or astronauts for the US government, the entire plan needs to be vetted by NASA.
About a year ago, Musk’s dreams of colonizing Mars took a spectacular hit when his rocket exploded and destroyed a $200 million satellite that Facebook had planned to use.
Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin announced separate plans for a manned mission to Mars on Friday, unveiling drawings of a space station orbiting the planet and landing craft that would carry four astronauts to the surface, Reuters reported.
“We know its cold, it’s pretty inhospitable, so we start with the robots and then we go down with these landers,” Lockheed official Rob Chambers told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
Chambers provided no date, but the planned mission would be a joint expedition with NASA, which aims to reach Mars in the 2030s.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture also is designing a heavy-lift vehicle called New Armstrong that will be capable of Mars transport, according to Reuters.
Resource:New York Post
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