Anybody who knows me knows that I am an Elon Musk fanboy, I love pretty much everything he touches so when it was announced that he was going to reveal his plans for SpaceX to reach Mars, I tuned in.
The Musk-haters out there will be quick to point out that this announcement conveniently followed a public disaster when their Falcon 9 rocket exploded on the pad on September 1st, destroying a Facebook satellite.
And while the timing might have been convenient, colonizing Mars is something that’s been on Elon Musks’ mind for a very long time.
His reasoning is that as long as the human race lives on one planet, there is no plan B, if some kind of extinction level event occurred here on Earth, which has happened 6 times in Earth’s history, we’d be screwed.
So he’s not interested in landing on Mars and planting a flag, he’s going for full-on colonization.
His ultimate goal is to get a million people living on Mars because only then would you have a self-sustaining population. And that would take upwards of 10,000 trips.
And how does he plan to get 10,000 people to Mars? With the Interplanetary Transport System.
It consists of three parts, the booster, the crew/cargo ship, and the refueling ship.
The ITS has two stages, and the second stage, the weaker one, would be more powerful than any other rocket currently being used today. It’s so powerful that Musk plans to cut the typical 6-month journey to Mars down to 3.
The booster stage is enormous, it has 42 engines, and not just any engines, SpaceX’s new Raptor engines.
The booster will also follow the lead of the Falcon 9 rocket by landing upright back on Earth.
The crew capsule is designed to hold up to 100 people, though later on it may hold up to 2 or 300 - remember Musk wants to colonize Mars.
He didn’t really have any renderings of the inside of the capsule other than this epic sci-fi picture, but he did say in an interview that it would be luxurious and have all kinds of amenities like a movie theater and a restaurant. He compared it more to a cruise ship.
And the third segment of the vehicle is a refueling capsule, which uses the exact same design as the crew capsule, only it’s just filled with fuel.