SpaceX founder, Elon Musk revealed his vision of helping the human race to be an interplanetary species at the 2017 International Astronautical Congress in Australia. He revealed the SpaceX Plan to reach Mars by 2022.
“The future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we’re a space-faring species than if we’re not,” Musk said as he took the stage. “It’s about believing in the future and thinking the future will be better than the past.
Musk stated that this plan has always been expensive and he is confident that SpaceX has solved the problem of how to pay for it now, achieve cost efficiencies, and potentially open up new streams of income to fund Mars Missions.
Musk also revealed that SpaceX has been working on the propulsive landing which is needed to land on the Mars. He said they have been improving landing with Flacon 9 “That’s what they’ve been doing across 16 successful landings in a row”, “And that’s without any redundancies.” He also declared that Falcon 9 has high reliability of landing on a single engine as either of engines can be used for landing and can probably achieve landing reliability on par with most commercial airlines.
The Propulsive landing’s precision is now so good that it doesn’t even need legs for the next version to land. It would land back on its launch mount without any trouble.
Elon Musk is targeting 20 launches by the end of this year, and 30 by the next year. He said, ” If SpaceX does do something like 30 launches next year, it’ll be approximately half of all orbital launches that occur next year on Earth”.
“It’s 2017, I mean we should have a lunar base by now – what the hell’s going on”, Musk said on stage.
More missions will be followed in 2024 in which four ships would fly including two cargo vessels and two ships of Martians. This would be the time when SpaceX will build a propellant plant as well as take the first people to Mars. The goal is to build an expanded surface presence and transform it into the first city of Mars.
Supporting the creation of a permanent, self-sustaining human presence on Mars. https://t.co/kCtBLPbSg8 pic.twitter.com/ra6hKsrOcG
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 29, 2017
All the planning & estimates are still a long road ahead, but the vision shared by Elon Musk & SpaceX looks promising. And Elon shocked everyone with the revelation of the last and the best goal that he shared, which is commercial spaceflight that could get passengers anywhere on Earth in under an hour.
You can watch the demonstration of the SpaceX by Elon Musk in the video below :
