Elon Musk has plans for fleets of rockets flying colonisers to Mars

SpaceX founder Elon Musk envisions a fleet of rockets ferrying thousands of passengers to set up colonies on Mars.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk, at a congress in Mexico, sets out his vision for a Mars colonial fleet. Pic: AP

Entrepreneur Elon Musk unveiled his contrarian vision of sending humans to Mars in roughly the next decade and ultimately setting up colonies there, relying on bold moves by private enterprise instead of more-gradual steps previously proposed by Washington.

Mr Musk — who in 14 years transformed his closely held rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies, into a global presence — envisions hosts of giant, reusable rockets standing more than 90m tall eventually launching fleets of carbon-fibre spacecraft into orbit.

The boosters would return to Earth, blast off again into the heavens with “tanker” spaceships capable of refuelling the initial vehicles, and then send those serviced spacecraft on their way to the red planet. The rockets would be twice as powerful as the Saturn 5 boosters that sent US astronauts to the Moon. Each fully-developed spacecraft likely would carry between 100 and 200 passengers, Mr Musk said.

The long-anticipated announcement and video simulation came during an international space conference in Mexico, with highlights transmitted across the globe by video feeds and social media.

By laying out such grand plans without specific funding projections, operational specifics or sign-off by government officials, Mr Musk disclosed what detractors already have called a general sci-fi dream. His speech was aptly titled: “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species.”

The long-term goal, Mr Musk said, is “actually building a city” on Mars, though he didn’t immediately outline a possible timetable. Projecting that in the end there may be hundreds of thousands of inhabitants on Mars, he said they would be served by airline-like flights lasting a half-dozen or so months to and from Earth.

“If things go super well,” Mr Musk said, initial manned landings “may be in the 10-year time frame,” adding there is “a good chance we don’t succeed” that quickly.

Before getting into some engineering issues, Mr Musk described market forces he hopes ultimately will drive humans to flock to Mars to set up a “self-sustaining civilisation.” That goal, he said, will be attainable only if transportation and operating costs plummet to the point that a seat on the proposed “Interplanetary Transport System” will be “roughly equivalent to a median house price in the US,” or roughly $US200,000.

Fuelled by 47 individual methane-powered engines, SpaceX, as the company is called, foresees a dramatically beefed-up version of its current Falcon 9 booster. The rocket could lose a number of engines on ascent and still successfully complete the mission, according to Mr Musk. If everything goes as intended, the rockets would be designed to land vertically back on the launch pad.

Mr Musk, whose former start-up is now valued by some analysts at more than $US10 billion, described a concept that presents a dramatic departure from the simpler building blocks approach favoured by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. But Mr Musk said, “We’re trying to make as much progress as we can with the resources we have.” He projected a $US10 billion investment to develop, test and deploy the preliminary hardware.

Mr Musk’s speech portends a space policy debate unlike any that has played out across the US — or for that matter, in the capitals of other space-faring nations. The focus is shifting to whether such entrepreneurial initiatives, or a combination of private-public funding, are best suited to further deep space exploration.

In the end, the project likely “is going to be a huge public-private partnership,” Mr Musk predicted.

During months of build-up to the speech — as Mr Musk stoked interest by throwing out titillating hints — some industry officials viewed the announcement partly as an effort to round up financial backing.

But Mr Musk’s message also contained an implicit warning for NASA. His strategy and priorities imply that SpaceX believes it can devise short-term and long-term plans to reach Mars that will be faster, cheaper and better than those being developed by NASA or its counterparts in other countries.

Elon Musk tells space buffs of his plans for a fleet of rockets carrying passengers to Mars. Pic: AP

For all the ambitious talk, SpaceX hasn’t yet launched a single manned mission. Its current timetable for taking astronauts to orbit by 2018 is six years late. On a per-seat basis, the projected cost is roughly to end up four times what the company initially estimated the cost would be for flights starting in 2012.

After years of uncertainty about its direction, NASA is now relying on a go-slower approach to the red planet, focusing first on testing technology around the moon and then using an unmanned spacecraft to grab an asteroid, extract a sample and pull it into the moon’s orbit. The agency envisions that it will send the first astronauts to Mars around 2035. Costs are estimated to begin in the range of several hundred billions of dollars, depending on what assumptions are used and who is running the calculations.

Under all scenarios, NASA chief Charles Bolden and industry officials have said international co-operation will be essential from a financing as well as a technical perspective.

Mr Musk’s strategy carries considerable risks for SpaceX, because NASA is, and likely will remain, the company’s biggest customer. In addition, SpaceX management is wrestling with a still-unexplained explosion of a Falcon 9 rocket during routine ground tests some four weeks ago.

Long before Mr Musk jumped into the rocket-making business, he dreamt about colonising the solar system. A sometimes brash leader and self-taught rocket engineer, the chairman of SpaceX sometimes reminds reporters he also is the company’s chief designer.

Even among veteran space experts tied to traditional programs, Mr Musk’s approach to reach Mars has garnered support. “It will never happen as long as NASA is in charge of it,” Mark Albrecht, a former senior industry and government space official, said during a conference in Pasadena in January.

Dow Jones Newswires