Elon Musk won’t rest until he plants that flag on Mars
Elon Musk’s detractors have no answer to the sheer audacity of what he’s accomplished. Who’d bet against him now?
“CAPE CANAVERAL (Cosmic News Network) March 19, 2024. With a skull-splitting roar the biggest rocket ever built blasted off today for Mars, marking what the veteran tech billionaire and inventor Elon Musk called the dawn of a new age for humanity as a multi-planet species.
“A ten-storey SpaceX launch vehicle delivered the Heart of Gold spaceship to low Earth orbit carrying 40 astronauts, led by commander Diane Dare, together with 100 tonnes of food and water. The ship will be joined in orbit by three more - two cargo vessels and another carrying crew - before being refuelled and departing together on the six-month voyage through deep space.
“ ‘Go in peace,’ President Winfrey told the crew, joining Mr Musk for the launch. ‘Go in the spirit of Armstrong, Earhart and Columbus’.”
Hang on a minute. Are we getting ahead of ourselves? That depends on our response to this week’s actual mind-blowing space launch by Mr Musk’s Falcon Heavy behemoth. He has his detractors, but they have no answer to the sheer audacity of what was accomplished from launch pad 39A at Cape Canaveral on Tuesday.
For those who missed it, at zero cost to taxpayers, the mightiest spacecraft since Saturn V took off, sent its boosters back to earth to be reused and released a Tesla sports car (also made by Musk) on a 100 million-mile journey to the asteroid belt. It was meant to go to Mars, but still. It was all extraordinary.
Big rockets are back. Big dreams are back. Anything is possible. Or, as Robert Zubrin, founder and president of the Mars Society, puts it: “This is a revolution. The naysayers have been completely refuted. The moon is now within reach. Mars is now within reach. The moment is at hand to open the space frontier.”
Dr Zubrin is parti pris, as his job title suggests, but in the same statement he made a serious point about puny thinking and recent history. Seven years ago the US government’s official review of Nasa’s human spaceflight plans said its moon programme should be scrapped because the heavy-lift rocket required would take 12 years and dollars 36 billion to build. The Falcon Heavy that lifted off this week took half the time and cost half a billion. That is, SpaceX spent about a seventieth of what Nasa expected to pay Boeing and others for a much less capable rocket.
Tuesday’s launch was flawless. It was watched by the biggest crowds the Cape has seen since the last flight of the Shuttle in 2011. There was a high chance of the rocket exploding on take-off because it had never been tested in flight, but that didn’t happen. All 27 engines lit up and punched a hole in the sky, just like in the SpaceX animations viewed by ten million people on YouTube in anticipation. The “centre core” missed its landing barge in the ocean, but the perfectly synchronised return to earth of the two side-boosters was like something out of Iron Man, and Nasa has never even tried it.
Musk hopes he has impressed potential clients in the commercial satellite business who are still using European Ariane rockets even though they are much more expensive than his, or Russian Protons even though they are much less reliable. From the start of SpaceX in 2002, putting other people’s stuff into orbit has only ever been a means to an end. At the very least the man in charge has earned a fresh hearing on his grander plans, however mad they seem.
So here goes. In a 2013 memo to SpaceX staff who wanted the company to go public, he explained that its raison d’etre wouldn’t suit most shareholders: “Creating the technology to establish life on Mars is and always has been the fundamental goal. If being a public company diminishes that likelihood, then we should not do so until Mars is secure.”
Since then he has kept his word, kept the company private, seen a few rockets explode and a much larger number work. By 2022 he wants to have completed an entirely new rocket capable of lifting half as much again as the Saturn V, carrying a large crew to Mars and back and landing anywhere in the solar system.
This is the Big F***ing Rocket or BFR, propelled by 31 newly designed engines three times more powerful than the Merlins on the Falcon Heavy. Musk’s “aspirational” goal is to send a cargo version straight to Mars carrying robots that would extract water from its permafrost and carbon dioxide from its atmosphere. These would be combined using the tried and tested Sabatier process to produce liquid oxygen and methane - rocket fuel for the return trip.
Before that Musk may fly another Falcon Heavy round the moon as early as this year. In 2024, the next launch window for a so-called Hohmann transfer - the shortest route to Mars - he wants four more BFRs ready to start its colonisation. The crew sections, nine metres wide, would have cabins, cafes, solar storm shelters to protect humans from excessive radiation, and possibly microgravity. They’d be fun to fly in, he has said. In other words, unlike the cramped and noisy conditions Nasa expects astronauts to tolerate on the International Space Station. They’d be more like the Starship Enterprise.
On his timetable, SpaceX gets people to Mars years if not decades before the first nation state could. Artists’ impressions of his first spaceship’s arrival there offer bracing views over the astronauts’ shoulders as the air lock opens. But views of what, exactly?
And here’s the rub. Joseph Michalski of the University of Hong Kong has written in Nature Astronomy that the Mars that humans will step on to offers only “a hyper-arid, frozen desert with a surface bombarded by high-energy solar and cosmic radiation for more than a billion years”.
This is the emerging consensus after years of clutching at straws. There is no surface water up there and almost certainly no life. It’s the sort of Mars that Matt Damon’s character in The Martian was concerned, above all, to flee.
You might conclude from this that Musk is nuts and will never find anyone to crew a SpaceX mission to Mars, let alone stay there, but you’d be wrong. I interviewed him once, at the headquarters of his electric car company near San Francisco. The red Roadster now sailing through the cosmos was parked outside. The Roadster as a product was already a phenomenon and Musk was talking a big game about weaning the planet off fossil fuels, but so were a lot of people. If anyone had said then that by 2018 he would be selling 100,000 luxury electric cars a year, building the world’s biggest battery factory and flying the world’s biggest rocket they would have been warned off the Kool-Aid.
So far the Musk story has been that he always overshoots his own timetable but always confounds his doubters in the end, not that he’s nuts. That label is more often applied to people who have been addicted to the idea of Mars longer than he has. I’ve met them too, in a simulated Mars “hab” in a red desert miles from anywhere in southern Utah. It was essentially a round, two-storey hut the diameter of a big rocket. It was run by the Mars Society and I spent two days there with a dozen of its keener members, dressing up in space suits and waiting for long periods in air locks every time we went outside.
It was a blast, partly because we had Honda four-wheelers on which to drive all over the desert. My fellow crew members were charming, educated, self-aware and adamant - every one - that they would jump at the chance to go to the real Mars even if it meant not coming back. Some of them were students but most were older. They were from the generation of scientists and dreamers inspired by the moon landings and dismayed by Uncle Sam’s loss of faith in human space exploration ever since.
Congress slashed Nasa’s budgets the moment the space race was won. Musk wants another one. “Races are fun,” he says, as the employer of teams of space engineers trained and then let go by Nasa. There are competitors willing to oblige. One is Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Amazon, who is building his own family of rockets with less ambition than Musk but much more money. Bezos doesn’t talk about Mars, although he shares Musk’s view that humans need to find a way to live in space in case Earth becomes uninhabitable. His net worth is around dollars 100 billion, five times that of Musk’s. Besides his personal wealth, Musk has a space launch order book at SpaceX worth dollars 10 billion and a new pay deal that could bring him a dollars 250 billion windfall if he meets a series of performance targets over the next ten years. Equally it could bring him nothing.
With this in mind he has been thinking hard about ways to finance mass-production of the BFR. Last year he came up with a plan to use large fleets of them for orbital flights carrying paying passengers from anywhere to anywhere on Earth in half an hour or less, for roughly the same as a premium economy airfare. As ever his graphics team produced a seductive video teaser, this time showing New Yorkers with hand luggage taking a wave-piercing catamaran to a floating spaceport in Long Island Sound for the morning BFR shuttle to Shanghai. It was cool but it should have strained the credulity of even his most fervent admirers. They lapped it up.
Another competitor is China, with plans for the moon and Mars, virtually unlimited resources and the extra zing of national pride. A third competitor is Lockheed Martin, Boeing’s old co-conspirator from their decades as de facto monopolists in the private spaceflight business. Its plans for Mars are quaint next to Musk’s. On its first trip there - in the 2030s, maybe - Lockheed’s spaceship wouldn’t even land. It looks lumpy. It would carry six people, tops. The company’s official presentation asks questions where Musk gives answers, which may sound sensible but feels pathetic in the brave new world born last Tuesday afternoon.
Donald Trump approves, and who wouldn’t? In a congratulatory tweet he hailed “American ingenuity at its best”. As it happens Musk is South African-born and went to university in Canada but most of his boffins are home-grown, and it’s true there is an only-in-America feel to the whole SpaceX jamboree. It feeds, specifically, off Silicon Valley, where decades of federal funding have helped to spawn not only a much-imitated start-up culture but also the world’s six biggest companies by market capitalisation and a generation of billionaires driven by nostalgia for their boyhoods, frustration with the idea of limits set by government, and rivalry among themselves.
That rivalry alone is probably enough to account for Musk’s Mars fetish. But one man’s obsession won’t raise the billions necessary for what he admits will have to be a public-private partnership. For that, a grown-up case has to be made; one that answers the “why?” question not just for Elon Musk and Robert Zubrin but for Joe Taxpayer and his congresswoman.
On the morning of the Falcon Heavy launch Bill Nye offered an answer. Nye, a former Boeing engineer, is a science broadcaster and celebrity who now runs the Planetary Society. “The reason a society does this is there are two questions,” he said. “Where did we come from? And are we alone in the universe? And if you want to answer these questions you have to explore space.”
America has form committing massive sums to lofty goals. Forget the Cold War for a moment; President Kennedy reminded the great space city of Houston as it geared up for the Apollo programme that “we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard”. That struck a chord and the same sentiment could do so again. To “where did we come from?” and “are we alone?”, why not add “what are we capable of?” Hardcore Mars fans already have the answer. They expect it to produce stories like this:
“KEPLER BASE, MARS (Cosmic News Network) March 19, 2054. History was made on Mars today when humans collected their first harvest of non-greenhouse vegetables grown in augmented Martian soil, proving that ‘terraforming’ could turn the red planet green within their lifetimes.
“Nearly 90 kilograms of genetically modified potatoes from seeds developed to grow at sub-zero temperatures were gathered in by a team led by the first human born on Mars, legendary commander Diane Dare’s son, Dan.”
Terraforming is not something you have traditionally been able to write about in a mainstream newspaper without total loss of credibility. That may still be the case, but in the spirit of Armstrong, Earhart, Columbus and Falcon Heavy, let’s find out.
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