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So Elon Musk (founder of PayPal, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX) has unveiled his plan to send a crew of 100 people to Mars as early as the mid to late 2020s.
Here's a video showing how it would be done:
The goal is that a ticket to Mars could be as low as the cost of a house.
Sounds crazy but this guy has been pushing humanity's space exploration technology in the last decade or so with break-through technologies such as the re-usable Falcon 9 rocket. This rocket is already being used to deliver pay-loads to Earth's orbit and the ISS. But what is fantastic about it is that it can return to and land back on Earth for re-use. SpaceX has already successfully landed a couple rockets but is yet to re-use one (although, it's coming soon). And as if just landing back on Earth wasn't enough, they actually landed on a remote-controlled ocean barge (to save on re-entry fuel):
This suddenly makes sending stuff to space much less expensive because it means that the first (and theoretically 2nd stage too) are not wasted with every launch. There is no need to build a whole new rocket every time we want to send a satellite or crew in space. It also means that the turn-around is much faster so that we can send rockets more often and more cheaply.
The rocket in the last video was actually launching SpaceX's Dragon crew spacecraft. SpaceX plans to launch a Red Dragon spacecraft based off the Dragon which will be used for preliminary un-manned missions to Mars using a Falcon 9 Heavy Rocket (basically 3 normal Falcon 9 rockets attached together which take off in unison but land independently). And it could happen as soon as 2018 (although, I wouldn't count on it too much):
Back to that manned mission to Mars, Jason Torchinsky at Jalopnik has presented a number of obvious flaws in Elon Musk's plan and how we would go about it more realistically based on our current knowledge of space exploration. Read about it here.
Between SpaceX and Blue Origin (founded by Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon), we are living in exciting times!
So, I ask the question: would you go to Mars if you could?
Here's a video showing how it would be done:
The goal is that a ticket to Mars could be as low as the cost of a house.
Sounds crazy but this guy has been pushing humanity's space exploration technology in the last decade or so with break-through technologies such as the re-usable Falcon 9 rocket. This rocket is already being used to deliver pay-loads to Earth's orbit and the ISS. But what is fantastic about it is that it can return to and land back on Earth for re-use. SpaceX has already successfully landed a couple rockets but is yet to re-use one (although, it's coming soon). And as if just landing back on Earth wasn't enough, they actually landed on a remote-controlled ocean barge (to save on re-entry fuel):
This suddenly makes sending stuff to space much less expensive because it means that the first (and theoretically 2nd stage too) are not wasted with every launch. There is no need to build a whole new rocket every time we want to send a satellite or crew in space. It also means that the turn-around is much faster so that we can send rockets more often and more cheaply.
The rocket in the last video was actually launching SpaceX's Dragon crew spacecraft. SpaceX plans to launch a Red Dragon spacecraft based off the Dragon which will be used for preliminary un-manned missions to Mars using a Falcon 9 Heavy Rocket (basically 3 normal Falcon 9 rockets attached together which take off in unison but land independently). And it could happen as soon as 2018 (although, I wouldn't count on it too much):
Back to that manned mission to Mars, Jason Torchinsky at Jalopnik has presented a number of obvious flaws in Elon Musk's plan and how we would go about it more realistically based on our current knowledge of space exploration. Read about it here.
Between SpaceX and Blue Origin (founded by Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon), we are living in exciting times!
So, I ask the question: would you go to Mars if you could?
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