Entrepreneur and inventor Elon Musk has made his big pitch to start a human colony on Mars by 2024.
Image: imago/United Archives
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Star engineer Elon Musk unveiled an ambitious plan late Tuesday for a human colony on Mars as early as 2024. According to Musk, his company SpaceX is working on a new rocket and capsule capable of bringing 100 people to the red planet at a time.
Once the infrastructure is in place, SpaceX envisions flying to Mars once very 25 months, when it is best aligned with the Earth. One major difference between Musk's plan and similar endeavors like Netherlands-based Mars One is that because a key business strategy of SpaceX is to reuse spacecraft, colonists would not be signed up for a one-way ticket.
"The number of people willing to move to Mars is much greater if they have the option of returning, even if they never do," Musk said at the International Astronautical Congress meeting in Guadalajara., Mexico.
He added the caveat, however, that the risk of accidents and fatality remains a major risk of space travel.
"The risk of fatality will be high. There's no way around it. Basically, are you prepared to die, and if that's OK then you're a candidate for going," he said during his presentation.
Another important factor is cementing his plan is to keep costs down, the inventor told the audience. He estimated it would take $10 billion to finance the large colony SpaceX hopes for.
"You can't create a self-sustaining civilization if the ticket price is $10 billion per person," the investor told the audience. "Our goal is to get it roughly equivalent to (the) cost of a median house in the United States, about $200,000."
There are still kinks to work out - on September 1, a SpaceX rocket carrying a $200 million Israeli satellite blew up in FloridaImage: twitter/PointyEndUp
He addd that the trip to Mars would be "fun" - and that the capsule bring people to Mars would have restaurants, games, and movies.
Hurdles to overcome
Musk's grandiose plan also includes eventually developing technology for terraforming – the process of turning an alien planet's ground and atmosphere into earth-like conditions.
Mars lies some 225 million kilometers (140 million miles) from Earth. The journey there would take between six and nine months, though Musk said his newly designed craft would cut travel time down to three months. NASA has agreed to help with communications and consulting in exchange for SpaceX's flight data.
The company's plan remains an extremely lofty one, for even after safety, financial, and transport kinks are worked out, thus far the largest spacecraft that has been able to land on Mars was the one-ton Curiosity rover. That and SpaceX's two recent accidents that resulted in the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment when rockets exploded may prove bigger hurdles than Musk anticipates.
es/kl (Reuters, AFP)
The ExoMars mission: Phase 1 begins
The goal of the ExoMars mission is to search for traces of life on Mars. The first phase of the mission will search for the best place to do so on the red planet.
Image: ESA
All fueled up
More than a decade's worth of work is tucked inside the body of this Russian Proton-M rocket: the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and the Schiaparelli EDM lander. The rocket, having just been fueled, was moved to the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on March 10, 2016, where it was raised upright. Historically, the Proton rocket has a failure rate of 10 percent.
Image: ESA
Separation
Hours after the launch, the orbiter (black) and lander (gold) will emerge from the rocket's shell. Thus begins their seven-month journey to Mars. The Earth-Mars orbital alignment is favorable to this portion of the ExoMars mission, meaning the journey is a relatively short one.
Image: ESA
Goodbye, friend
Having accompanied each other through empty space for more than 200 days, the lander and orbiter will detach from one another three days before reaching Mars. The time is late October. For the rest of their robotic lives, they're on their own.
Image: ESA
Down it goes!
And the lander's off! At this point it's traveling at more than 20,000 kilometers per hour (12,500 miles per hour, or about 3 miles per second). Its destination is predetermined: Meridiani Planum, a flat, broad plain rich in hematite, which on Earth is often formed in hot springs. Things are about to get hot...
Image: ESA
Soft landing
Mars' atmosphere will "drag" or slow the lander, allowing it to deploy a parachute (model seen here) to reduce its velocity to roughly 200 kilometers per hour (120 MPH). When its height above the surface reaches 1.2 kilometers, the cord will sever and the lander will deploy thrusters to slow its descent and land.
Image: ESA
Tasting the air
Once on Mars, a variety of instruments inside the lander will collect various atmospheric data over a period of four days. This will give Europe's and Russia's space agencies critical information for a future rover landing. When the four days are up, Schiaparelli's battery will run out. Its mission is over.
Image: ESA
Great view up here!
Meanwhile, the orbiter will still be scooting around up above. The jets seen here will only be deployed initially - to change an elliptical orbit into a circular one.
Image: ESA
Something smells
At that point, the orbiter's job for the next few years will be to "sniff" Mars' atmosphere for traces of methane gas. Scientists in Europe and Russia will be analyzing this data to determine the best spot to aim their rover. Methane could be a clue to biological activity - a sign of life on Mars.
Image: ESA
The ExoMars rover
A 2018 follow-up launch will send the ExoMars rover toward a predetermined point on the red planet - likely Oxia Planum, which is 3,000 meters below the Martian mean and which is rich in iron-magnesium. That means water might have played a role there. See that dark gray cylinder on the front...?
Image: ESA
Drill, baby, drill!
That's the drill that will collect "cores" of Martian soil (prototype above). The hope is that when it's analyzed inside the machine through an organic molecule analyzer, it will yield signs that biological activity once occurred there. The earliest that would happen is 2019 (and maybe 2021). But it would be enormously historic. It would be the first direct evidence of life on Mars.
