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Amid all the furore over who did what first between Space X and Blue Origin and repeated attempts by the former to land a rocket booster on its drone-barge, Space X CEO Elon Musk is still thinking about Mars. He's been doing that for a while in-fact and has some quite solid ideas about how to approach it. Ideas he plans to share with the world a little later this year.
Musk has said previously that Mars is such a big dream for him, that he's said he'd happily die there; just not on impact. While it seems unlikely he'll be going there any time soon, he has been championing human space-flight to Mars for some time, even if NASA claims we won't even get into orbit around the red planet until sometime in the 2030s.
That's not how Musk sees it though. In a talk at the StartMeUpHK festival in Hong Kong where he was a guest speaker, Musk said that by September, Space X would unveil plans to get humans to Mars within the next 10 years. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIRqB5iqWA8′]
The event he is expected to make the plans public at, is the International Astronautical Conference, set to be held in Mexico between 26th and 30th September (thanks Ars). It will likely involve a newer rocket design, larger and more powerful than the current Falcon 9 currently used to ferry cargo and other payloads into Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Perhaps even more advanced than the Falcon Heavy design.
In the shorter term however, Space X will continue attempting to land its rocket boosters on the drone barge and will be looking to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station in its Dragon capsule towards the end or 2017.
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KitGuru Says: It's pretty exciting being part of this generation. We're going to get to see the earliest efforts of human colonisation and explore virtual reality. What a treat.
They have an unpublished design for Falcon X (10, presumably) using 9 Raptor engines, which are about three times the size of the Merlin engines, and use super-cooled liquid Methane and Oxygen as fuels. I have also seen drawings of a Falcon X Heavy, using three cylinders similar to the Falcon 9 Heavy. Most of that is rumors and speculation, but perhaps we’ll get some reveals this year. They have definitely been testing the Raptor engine on firing stands (Michigan I think).
What I really don’t get is why 9 engines when 7 offer the most space-efficient layout (imagine the points of a 6-triangle hexagon, and you have six engines around the outside and one in the middle).
designing a rocket for a mission to mars, the main issue is going to be fuel to weight balance. someone somewhere would have calculated out the need for those 9 rockets just to get to mars and back.
I suspect it has something to do with the amount of thrust they can afford to lose while still completing the mission. 14% may be too much to lose and still make orbital insertion.
so much, much money to go to Mars… meanwhile on Earth, people hungry, thirsty, and homeless. A terrible misallocation of capital.
Humans really need this kind of colonisation in this age. Because after destroying this earth by their so called great development, where will they go.They don’t know how to live in this earth properly,without harming it, that human race is looking into other planets and galaxies and dreaming about building a beautiful life there,how childish their thoughts are.And what will we get, if we go and live in mars or moon.The real beauty of science and technology is when it is used for making our lives more better and this earth a more healthier place.All the other technological revolutions by which we all take so much pride and wasting tons of money and time,is just for making toys,so that we can play for sometime and have some fun.
A future Earth with an abundance of biodiversity, preserved environments, space for free nature and for all of mankind’s enterprises, high technology and resources for all could be a reality, if only one single part of the equation was altered… Which is the number of human beings in existence. But since what is politically correct is to promote economical growth, and for this an ever increasing army of ants is needed to populate this planet and produce ever more goods to feed the financial chain, exploring this planet to the marrow in the process, we seem to be doomed to a virus-like existence that thrives on predation. There is no “head” in our collective existence, there is no collective plan for the future, no control in our reproduction rate, and only the advices of corrupt and power hungry leaders, or heads of sects in need of more family-bred followers are heeded.