Elon Musk expected to announce Mars colonization plan

[fuji]

More details tomorrow.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-23/elon-musk-to-outline-his-plans-for-mars

Musk’s keynote address, entitled “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species,” will tackle the technical challenges and “potential architectures for colonizing the Red Planet," according to organizers. Translation: huge rockets, big spacecraft. No one has been anticipating the event more eagerly than Musk, who founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp., his rocket-launch company, 14 years ago with the express goal of putting humans on other planets to live and work.

 

[Born2Star]

Hmm I guess Musk needs to make sure his rockets can launch first. They all exploded prematurely.

No pun intended.

 

[Allejandro2011]

Wonder how many years till that happens?

 

[fuji]

So basically this is his plan:

Perfect his reusable rockets and have them constantly ferrying people to and from the surface to an orbital way station. Then build a massive ship that goes back and forth to Mars picking people up in orbit and dropping them off at the other end.

He claims he can send a hundred people on each trip along with massive quantities of supplies.

Basically, an interplanetary transit system.

The massive cargo this thing could haul solves a lot of survival problems on Mars. He also wants to send more than just a couple of people, hundreds. He wants to put a city there.

If he can come up with the colossal amount of money it would take, it's possible be could do this. He estimates it would currently cost 20 billion per person but thinks technological progress will bring the price down to $200k per person: affordable by most people in western nations if they really want to go.