Musk’s Mars Mission: The quest for the other planet

Though personally, I don’t like the use of a word like “colonizing” but probably this isn’t the right place to get into morphological nuances of Elon Musk’s Mars Mission that aims to make humans an ‘interplanetary species’.

Speaking at the International Astronautical Conference in Mexico, Musk detailed out everything about SpaceX’s plans to colonize Mars in the coming decades.

The note was well prepared, touching upon the raw nerve first. Musk started off with the existential threat that looms large on mankind on earth and the need to look for an alternative.

The reason to go is that we have two paths as humans, Musk said: One path is we stay on Earth forever and eventually face an extinction event. The alternative is to become a spacefaring and multi-planetary species, “which I hope you would agree that is the right way to go.”

After this, it was a step by step envisioning of a “self-sustaining city” on Mars, a dream Musk has nurtured for long.

Right before the presentation, SpaceX released a mini-preview of what we could expect from its new Interplanetary Transport System.

The video stops right when one wants to know what after landing?

For Mars, Musk envisions an enormous booster rocket with 42 new Raptor engines blasting off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and launching a spacecraft holding roughly 100 people toward Mars. The spacecraft will be refueled in orbit before heading to the Red Planet.

The trip could take 80 to 150 days, depending on the positions of Earth and Mars at the time. Factories would be built on Mars to produce fuel for the return trip home. With 1,000 ships and 200 people per ship, Musk estimated that it would take 40 to 100 years to achieve a fully self-sustaining civilization on Mars.

But it isn’t as simple as it sounds. The biggest thing stopping us from doing so, Musk said, is actually that there is no intersection of sets of people who want to go and who can afford to go. At present, he has estimated the cost at about $10 billion. The SpaceX founder detailed four ways that he believed a ticket to Mars would become a possible purchase for many people—similar to buying a house. These methods include using reusable rockets, refueling the spaceship in space, and using a methane fuel instead of traditional rocket fuels. Finally, that methane fuel could be harvested on Mars itself.

That first launch could take place in about 10 years “if things go super-well,” Musk said.

But whether this is really doable depends on a lot on whether SpaceX can actually get the money together. “I would say it’s going to be a challenge to fund this whole project,” Musk noted.

Musk also hinted that he would personally be devoting assets to the project. “I really don’t have any other motivation for personally accumulating assets, except to make the biggest contribution I can to making life multi-planetary,” he said. But even then, there would still need to be significant outside investment.

“I know there’s a lot of people in the private sector interested in funding a trip to Mars, hopefully, there will be interest in the government side as well,” Musk said. “Ultimately this will be a huge private-public partnership.”

Finally, let's come to the “self-sustaining city”. Interestingly, while we now know a lot more about how SpaceX plans to get to Mars, details about how people will actually survive up there remain sketchy.

“The goal of SpaceX is really to build the transport system,” said Musk, before suggesting that the Martian colonists themselves would do much of the building. “Who wants to be among the first to build everything, from refineries to the first pizza joint?” Musk asked.

But even before that, one needs clean water, some kind of habitat to pinpoint few basics. Who exactly, Musk thinks to build and maintain that basic infrastructure. Practical question.

Musk, while determined in his vision of how humans can get to Mars, is less sure about whether he would risk his own life to do so.

"I've got to make sure that if something goes wrong on the flight and I die that there's a good succession plan and the mission of the company continues and it doesn't get taken over by investors who just want to maximize the profitability of the company," Musk said. "I would like to see my kids grow up."

Who wouldn’t Elon!