In a series of tweets on Thursday, Elon Musk revealed new details about his plan to build a city of 1 million on Mars by 2050.
musk said He hoped to be able to build 1,000 spaceships in 10 years – the massive and apparently fully reusable spacecraft that SpaceX is developing in southern Texas. That is 100 spaceships per year.
Ultimately, Musk added, the goal is to launch an average of three spaceships a day and make the trip to Mars accessible to everyone.
“Must be that everyone can go if they want, with loans for those who have no money,” said Musk wrote,
Not enough to convince you to leave the earth behind?
“There will be many jobs on Mars!” he added,
Fleets of spaceships to make people multi-planetary
If realized as planned, the spaceship will be the most powerful launch system ever created. Each launch would bring enough thrust to put more than 100 tons (about seven fully loaded school buses) and 100 people into orbit at the same time.
Musk has not specified exactly what the missiles have to carry to Mars, but many foods, water, building materials, tools, and advanced life support systems are a matter of course. He therefore estimated that he would need an entire fleet of spaceships to build a permanent settlement.
“Megatons per year are required for orbit to make life multi-network,” he said tweeted on Thursday.
A total of 1,000 spaceships could hypothetically transport around 100 megatons of material to Mars. that’s the volume that musk has said he hopes to send to the red planet every year. If each ship carried around 100 passengers, this would result in a total migration of around 100,000 people.
Musk also suggested using the short time slots that Earth and Mars orbits take every 25 months. This allows the spaceship to jump out of the Earth’s rotation and embark on a journey to Mars that uses little fuel.
musk said He would take advantage of this by “loading the Mars fleet into orbit” and then sending every 1,000 ships on a Martian trajectory every 26 months through this 30-day window.
That seems to contradict an earlier one Tweet in which Musk said 1,000 spaceships would fly to Mars each year instead of every 26 months. In both cases, SpaceX is still far from achieving these goals.
A Starship prototype could be on the market within a few months
Musk says a new Starship prototype may be on the market before the end of March.
“Hopefully the first flight will be 2-3 months away,” said Musk tweeted on December 27th.
Development of the prototype was delayed after an accidental explosion during a fuel tank pressure test on November 20, when SpaceX’s first 16-story Starship prototype was blown up.
Loren Elliott / Getty Images
The company was able to build up to 20 different prototypes before the engineers embarked on a “1.0” design to fly cargo and people.
The full Starship launch system would also include a 22-story rocket booster called Super Heavy. together the whole thing would be about 118 meters high. During launch, a Starship spaceship drove on the booster, separated after the booster was nearly empty, and fired into orbit.
Samantha Lee / Business Insider
Both parts are designed to be fully reusable. Should this vision come true, Musk estimates that the cost of a single launch would be only $ 2 million – that would be hundreds of times cheaper than the current cost of launching a similar number of people and cargo into space on planned or existing missile (including SpaceX’s own Falcon 9 system).
Musk said in September that he hoped to be able to put a spaceship into orbit by mid-2020 and maybe even one person before the end of the year. Gwynne Shotwell, President and Chief Operating Officer of SpaceX, said during a NASA conference call that the company “aims to drop Starship 2022 on the lunar surface” and that Japanese technology entrepreneur and billionaire Yusaku Maezawa will fly around the moon in 2023.
However, all of these statements came before the Starship prototype exploded. SpaceX must also overcome some regulatory and practical hurdles – including ensuring the safety of residents of Boca Chica Village, which is within 3 kilometers of SpaceX’s Texas launch pad – before prototypes can be launched.
“I help pay, so I’m accumulating fortune on Earth,” said Musk tweeted on Thursday.
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