A new paper lays out the plan, and the SpaceX CEO has tweeted that revisions are coming. “If we can get the cost of moving to Mars to be roughly equivalent to a median house price in the United States, which is around $200,000, then I think the probability of establishing a self-sustaining civilization is very high,” he writes. “I think it would almost certainly occur.”
He thinks they might be able to get the cost down to less than $100,000.
So, how does he plan on reducing the cost!!
- The ship doesn’t have to be as reusable as a bike or a car since it will be flying only every two years, but it needs to be able to fly to Mars and back more than once. And it should be capable of refilling fuel in orbit.
- The colony built on Mars should be capable of producing propellant for ships so they can return to Earth. There are a few options for what that propellant could be. Methane would be best, Musk explains, since it’s cheaper and takes less energy to work with than another option, hydrogen.
“We are talking about a lift-off thrust of 13,000 tons, so it will be quite tectonic when it takes off,” writes Musk, adding, “This is really intended to carry huge numbers of people, ultimately millions of tons of cargo to Mars. Therefore, you really need something quite large in order to do that.”
You need a really powerful rocket to do this. The rocket will be very big and will need a lot of thrust.
Musk is cautiously ambitious about timing. The paper shows a timeline with a window for flights to Mars starting at the year 2023. “If things go super-well, it might be in the 10-year timeframe, but I do not want to say that is when it will occur,” Musk writes.
His whitepaper here.
The full report here.