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Elon Musk Proposes Spaceship That Can Send 100 People To Mars In 80 Days (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Today, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unveiled the Mars vehicle -- the spaceship his company plans to build to transport the first colonists to Mars. It will have a diameter of 17 meters. The plan is to send about 100 people per trip, though Musk wants to ultimately take 200 or more per flight to make the cost cheaper per person. The trip can take as little as 80 days or as many as 150 depending on the year. The hope is that the transport time will be only 30 days "in the more distant future." The rocket booster will have a diameter of 12 meters and the stack height will be 122 meters. The spaceship should hold a cargo of up to 450 tons depending on how many refills can be done with the tanker. As rumored, the Mars vehicle will be reusable and the spaceship will refuel in orbit. The trip will work like this: First, the spaceship will launch out of Pad 39A, which is under development right now at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. At liftoff, the booster will have 127,800 kilonewtons of thrust, or 28,730,000 pounds of thrust. Then, the spaceship and booster separate. The spaceship heads to orbit, while the booster heads back to Earth, coming back within about 20 minutes. Back on Earth, the booster lands on a launch mount and a propellant tanker is loaded onto the booster. The entire unit -- now filled with fuel -- lifts off again. It joins with the spaceship, which is then refueled in orbit. The propellant tankers will go up anywhere from three to five times to fill the tanks of the spaceship. The spaceship finally departs for Mars. To make the trip more attractive for its crew members, Musk promises that it'll be "really fun" with zero-G games, movies, cabins, games, a restaurant. Once it reaches Mars, the vehicle will land on the surface, using its rocket engines to lower itself gently down to the ground. The spaceship's passengers will use the vehicle, as well as cargo and hardware that's already been shipped over to Mars, to set up a long-term colony. At the rate of 20 to 50 total Mars trips, it will take anywhere from 40 to 100 years to achieve a fully self-sustaining civilization with one million people on Mars, says Musk.
The games start out as zero-G laser tag, with the winners moving on to a grueling regimen of real-time strategy games...
So are we sending lawyers, or members of government?
I come here for the love
Instead of the ambition to send people in giant ships to Mars, how about the ambition to fix the God damned space ships he's got now that regularly fail to get into LEO?
Good idea! You should call up Musk and suggest that to him, I bet he never thought of that.
Internet commenters save the day again!
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Well, don't colonize the Martian poles, then. Point taken.
Ezekiel 23:20
What about bankers?
Unregulated, they will be able to make Mars the most prosperous place in the galaxy by trading the assets there between themselves for ever increasing amounts of money. The freedom to create new complex derivative schemes without pesky oversight, will eliminate risk from the Mars economy, heralding a new dawn of prosperity and growth in the value of the assets that presently lie dormant there. New forms of high frequency trading will further boost liquidity, increasing investment and economic stability.
Before you know it, Mars will go from a worthless planet full of rocks, to one where those same rocks are worth trillions, and all without a single rock needing to be overturned. That, my friend, is the sort of true innovation that has built the West into the current powerhouse it is.
As an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?" Edison replied, "I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps."
Now I don't feel so bad about my 4,672-step IKEA bookshelf.