Elon Musk's Insanely Complex Plans May Put Over A Million People On Mars In The Next 100 Years

Elon Musk has always said he plans for humanity to get to Mars and eventually settle it, and now the SpaceX founder and billionaire has laid out his plans for the world to see.

NASA

Musk has published a paper titled ¡®Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species¡¯ in the New Space scientific journal, a research paper he first unveiled in Mexico in September 2016. In it, he details how he plans to settle a million people on Mars in the next 50 to 100 years.

¡°In my view, publishing this paper provides not only an opportunity for the spacefaring community to read the SpaceX vision in print with all the charts in context, but also serves as a valuable archival reference for future studies and planning,¡± New Space editor-in-chief and former Mars expert for NASA Scott Hubbard wrote.

Plans within plans

Musk¡¯s ideas focus on a combination of spaceships and reusable rockets, which he¡¯s dubbed the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS). SpaceX is currently developing a new Raptor engine, three times more powerful than the current engines on the Falcon 9, that will power both parts. The booster will be strapped to 42 Raptors, making it the most powerful rocket in history, capable of launching 300 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, or 550 metric tons if the booster is not going to be reused. To put that into perspective, NASA currently holds the record for most powerful rocket, with the Saturn V, used for the Apollo moon missions and was able to lift 135 metric tons.

SpaceX

The ITS rockets will lift spaceships to orbit, and then perform precision landings right back onto the launch pads they took off from, within 20 minutes. Over the course of their operations, the boosters will lift multiple spaceships, as well as refueling tankers, into Earth orbit. Each rocket is being designed to fly 1,000 times each before being retired. The spaceships themselves will be lifted to orbit devoid of fuel, to improve the number of people and amount of cargo it can carry. Then the refuelling tanks will be used to fill them up before they can leave

Meanwhile, the spaceships in orbit will remain there until Earth and Mars favourably align, which happens once every 26 months, and then set off en masse for the Red Planet. Eventually Musk plans for 1,000 ITS spaceships, each carrying at least 100 people, to leave Earth¡¯s orbit and shoot towards Mars during the small alignment window. If all goes according to plan, as many as a million people could be shipped off to the planet within the next 100 years.

Once there, the ITS doesn¡¯t stop working. Instead, Musk plans to set up manufacturing facilities alongside habitats on Mars, which would use natural resources on the planet to manufacture methane-based propellant. This would be used to fuel the spaceships¡¯ 9 Raptor engines so they can come back to Earth and be used to transport the next batch of settlers. Each one way trip takes about 80 days going at about 6 km/h, but Musk believes they can eventually up that speed to have people travelling for only 30 days. Each of these ITS spaceships are being planned to carry out 12-15 deep space operations in their lifetime.

SpaceX

Everything has a price

But the whole reason Musk has laid out these plans, is not because they haven¡¯t been thought of before. NASA is perfectly capable of lifting settlers to Mars on its own rocket systems. The difference is in how much it would cost.

Musk believes that the current Apollo-style system would cost $10 billion to lift humans to Mars ¡ª per person. Instead, by using reusable rockets, spaceships, tankers, and manufacturing fuel on Mars, he hopes to bring down ticket prices to get to the planet as low as $200,000 person, which is about the median house price for a home in the US. Eventually, he hopes that number will even go as low as $100,000.

NASA

If research and development remain on track, and manufacturing continues at current speed, Musk believes ITS will be ready to take flight as early as 10 years from now. Brilliant plans aside though, he isn¡¯t delusional about the chances of success.

¡°There is a huge amount of risk. It is going to cost a lot,¡± Musk wrote. ¡°There is a good chance we will not succeed, but we are going to do our best and try to make as much progress as possible.¡± And that¡¯s saying something, considering how often SpaceX has beaten the odds to do something incredible and unprecedented.

But maybe, just maybe, Musk¡¯s ideas will hold, his research and manufacturing teams will pull through. And if that happens, we may actually see humans on the face of Mars in our lifetime, and that¡¯s awe-inspiring.