When we were little, all of us had our own unique dreams and aspirations. Some of us wished to save the world from a fearful crisis, while others wanted the ability to venture up into outer space. The latter of the two is what Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, was yearning for since he was young. Even today, Musk’s passion is evident, with his promise to allow travel to Mars as early as 2021 and other planets eventually.
Founded in March 2012, SpaceX possesses myriad ambitious goals. Their most fascinating, and frankly quite shocking, mission is to make humans a multiplanetary species. But what does that mean, and how is it even feasible? With an open mind and enough insightfully curious questions, anyone can fully understand SpaceX’s seemingly unimaginable plans and exactly how they are going to achieve them.
First of all, one may wonder why SpaceX is choosing Mars as their desired destination, of all the planets to choose from. According to Musk in his presentation “Making Humans A Multiplanetary Species,” Venus is a “super high-pressure hot acid bath. So that would be a tricky one. Mercury is also way too close to the sun. We could go potentially out on one of the moons of Jupiter but those are much farther out. It really only leaves us with one option if we want to become a multi-planet civilization—and that’s Mars. We could simply go to the Moon, but it’s much smaller than any actual planet. It doesn’t have any atmosphere… and in general Mars is far better suited to ultimately scale up to be a self-sustaining civilization.” Musk discussed the benefit of decent sunlight on Mars as well as the possibility of growing plants in the future.
The next question that arises when one considers how they could get to Mars is the price of the trip. Currently, the richest person in the world couldn’t get to Mars. The technology simply hasn’t been created yet, let alone tested for safety. Musk and the SpaceX team want to change this, but the predicted price of a voyage to Mars in the next decade would be roughly ten billion dollars per person if traditional methods, such as an Apollo-style approach, are used. Musk claims what we need is a price around the median cost of a house in the United States. This means decreasing the cost of the trip by five million percent.
Luckily, SpaceX could achieve this goal of an immense price reduction through full reusability of a rocket and orbital refuelling. Airplanes are good examples of full reusability; Musk talked about how a ticket for a $90 million aircraft would be half a million dollars if it was single-use (the plane stopped working after just one flight). However, because planes can be flown thousands of times, the price is significantly lower. Essentially, if rockets could be used time and time again, just like airplanes today, the price of the ticket would drop by about a factor of a hundred. Regarding refueling in orbit, spreading the required lift capacity across multiple launches would greatly reduce development costs. These elements are vital if SpaceX is to have a successful future trip to the Red Planet.
The system architecture and process are designed to not be too complicated. The spaceship will have three main parts: the actual ship, a tanker, and a booster. After the ship launches, there will be a stage separation between the booster and the main spaceship once the ship leaves Earth’s atmosphere. The booster returns to Earth while the actual spaceship will head to its “parking orbit” until it is refueled by the booster, whose main job is to accelerate the rate at which the spaceship travels. After the booster lands back on Earth, a propellant tanker is loaded onto it. The booster takes back off once the tank is attached and will reach and refuel the spaceship in its parking-position orbit. From there, the tanker will return to Earth and the spaceship will depart for Mars. Pricing among the three parts of the whole architecture differs, as the booster’s fabrication cost is about $230 million, the tanker’s about $130 million, and the preeminent ship’s cost around $200 million.
One might wonder where this money is coming from. SpaceX expects that it will receive a vast net cash flow from large corporations to fund development of the spaceship and all of its components once people realize that a trip to Mars really is attainable. NASA may also play a large part, as SpaceX has assisted them in multiple launches in the past. In addition, SpaceX presupposes to be funded by individuals who are interested in developing a base on Mars within the private sector. Ultimately, Musk believes this will be a “huge public-private partnership.”
Beyond Mars, Musk wants to eventually apply the same methods of transportation to other vehicles that could bring civilization to even more planets in our solar system, such as Jupiter and its moons, like Enceladus or Europa. Musk boldly claimed this system gives anyone freedom to go anywhere they want in the greater solar system. So maybe, if we are lucky, you truly can fulfill your childhood dream of living on Mars.