Elon Musk To Unveil Mars Spacecraft Later This Year, For 2025 Flight (foxnews.com)

frank249 writes: Fox News is reporting that Space X and Tesla CEO Elon Musk expects to unveil plans for the spacecraft that would send humans to Mars within a decade. Speaking at an event in Hong Kong, Musk said he was 'hoping to describe the architecture' of the spacecraft at the International Astronautical Conference in Mexico in late September. "That will be quite exciting," Musk said. 'In terms of the first flight to Mars, we are hoping to do that around 2025.' As for his plans to go into space, Musk said he was hoping to reach the International Space Station 'four or five years from now.'

Comments

Re:Mars Colonial Transporter

[Rei]

Meh. CH4, H2 and RP1 are all clean, cheap fuels - the levels of pollution and fuel costs are practically non-issues here. ISP, thrust and density are what matter. Methane simply lies on the curve between RP-1 and H2 in terms of thrust, density and ISP (significantly closer to RP-1 than H2). H2 is easier to produce on Mars than methane, which is in turn easier to produce than RP-1 - in this regard, methane is closer to H2 than RP-1 (the mass fractions of current hydrocarbon synthesis from CO2 and H2 tend to produce more methane than heavier hydrocarbons, although the ratios depend on the catalyst, and new catalysts could change this, and you could always do subsequent steps to combine light hydrocarbons)

Methane probably is a good balance for Mars if you want local propellant production. And really, since Mars round trips are so far down the rocket equation chain, you pretty much have to either use extremely high ISP fuels, or go with local propellant production. SpaceX has chosen the latter.