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Elon Musk: Future Round-Trip To Mars Could Cost Under $500,000
An anonymous reader writes with this quote from the BBC:
"Rocket entrepreneur Elon Musk believes he can get the cost of a round trip to Mars down to about half a million dollars. The SpaceX CEO says he has finally worked out how to do it, and told the BBC he would reveal further details later this year or early in 2013. ... 'My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars — this is very important — so you don't have to carry the return fuel when you go there,' he said. 'The whole system [must be] reusable — nothing is thrown away. That's very important because then you're just down to the cost of the propellant.' ... He conceded the figure was unlikely to be the opening price — rather, the cost of a ticket on a mature system that had been operating for about a decade. Nonetheless, Musk thought such an offering could be introduced in 10 years at best, and 15 at worst."
LEO is nearly halfway to Mars surface in terms of delta-v.
So yeah, SpaceX is directly addressing the most important component of making Mars missions economically feasible.
If we can make access LEO a relatively cheap commodity, and make it so we don't have to lift every single thing that we're going to take to Mars all at once, and have a way to have robotic manufacture of fuel on Mars for the trip back, then I can totally see Musk's statement playing out.
It does all hinge on that first huge step though. Fortunately SpaceX is hardly neglecting that part, and progress is promising.
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There is no fuel to be found, but you can make fuel from the atmosphere (CO2) and water (and lots of power from solar cells or fission). This has been proposed for decades now. For everything more than a one-off foot print mission it's certainly worth the effort.
Elon Musk may be a bit crazy, but he's not an idiot. In fact SpaceX has done lots of things meanwhile that were deemed plain impossible with the kind of money they had in hand. The crucial point will be if SpaceX will be a profitable company in the next years. If they manage to make sane profits I'm pretty well sure that Musk will put every penny into going to Mars. He's *that* crazy, really.
His plan sounds a lot like Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan detailed in The Case for Mars
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"My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system" ... NASA had that vision with the Space Shuttle, but even excluding all R&D and capital purchases, just the incremental costs per launch were orders of magnitude higher than $500k per seat. And that's just to LEO! OK, that's "halfway to anywhere", but maintenance is a bitch, the staff required is huge, on and on... NASA isn't a role model for efficiency, but I seriously doubt that the commercial sector is going to be able to outdevelop them in just 10-15 years.
I thought the same a few years ago, but SpaceX just did everything right then. Hey, they developed a launcher (two actually), launchpads and a spacecraft, built *and* launched them for about the same amount of money as NASA or ESA need to build a single launchpad. ESA's ATV alone (without the launcher and everything else) did cost *more* than what SpaceX did spend altogether until now and ATV is just a one-way orbital transporter with no reentry capability.
Outdeveloping NASA and the other government-fed entities seems very much possible.
Well, whatever you do, a 500 K$ per person price tag for the whole trip doesn't work. Even if you solve all major technical obstacles -- with that price, you're gonna be flooded with many thousands of applicants, whom you cannot all provide with a seat in a space ship, which means that basic supply-demand mechanisms will drive the price up.
You're mistakenly equating the cost to send someone to Mars and what YOU would pay to go to Mars. High demand and almost zero supply doesn't drive up what it costs SpaceX to do it, just what it costs you to pay SpaceX to do it.
Musk didn't say he could sell tickets to Mars for $500k in 15 years, he said he could send people to Mars for $500k. That's a HUGE difference, and means there is no question of demand or supply involved.