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Elon Musk lives and breathes to colonize Mars.
That's the spirit with which he founded SpaceX, his rocket company, in 2002. Musk was frustrated that NASA was not doing more to get people to the red planet – and feared that a plan relief for humanity is not developed (because when Earth becomes an uninhabitable land).
Since then, SpaceX has developed several impressive aerospace systems: Falcon 1, SpaceX's first orbital rocket; Grasshopper, a small self-test rocket; Falcon 9, an orbital class reusable launcher; Dragona, a spaceship for cargo and soon NASA astronauts; and Falcon Heavy, a super-heavy pitcher.
But Mars is a cold rock, ruthless and almost airless, located some 140 million kilometers from the Earth. Stunning ingenuity is needed to land even a small spaceship today, not to mention a giant spaceship full of passengers and cargo in the future.
That's why SpaceX is taking the lessons that the company has learned over the last 16 years – as well as more and more money and personnel – and using them to build a space vehicle called Big Falcon Rocket, or WCR.
This fully reusable 387-foot-tall system consists of two gigantic stages: a big Falcon spacecraft of about 18 floors and a huge and similar Big Falcon Booster. The booster will launch the spaceship (up) to space and then land for reuse.
Deadlines are unreliable with respect to manned spaceflight, but Musk's ambitious estimates of when SpaceX could reach Mars reveal its zeal to achieve that goal.
The following (somewhat speculative) schedule of SpaceX's plan is based on our reports as well as dates compiled by the Reddit r / SpaceX community.
Where is SpaceX today with its plans for Mars
Musk said the BFR spacecraft was the "most difficult part" of the system to succeed, so SpaceX is currently concentrating most of its energy there.
To this end, the company is building a BFR plant in Los Angeles Harbor, about 15 miles south of SpaceX headquarters. While this facility is being built, the engineers are working under a 20,000-square-foot tent to build a prototype spacecraft from advanced carbon fiber materials.
SpaceX is also meeting with NASA and other parties to present its mission plans for Mars, although much remains to be done to find a way to protect passengers from radiation, starvation and themselves.
2018: Construction of a launch assistance center in Boca Chica, a city located near Brownsville, Texas.
SpaceX needs a place to test and launch its prototype spacecraft, and the southern tip of Texas offers some benefits to the company. On the one hand, SpaceX can carry huge rocket parts over water in barges from Los Angeles, via the Panama Canal and up to Boca Chica (without doubt at a favorable price). Otherwise, the parts should be stolen or driven in a truck on the ground.
In addition, very few people live in the area, which is good for a company that fills a huge experimental spaceship filled with explosive liquids and ignites them on fire. Rockets can also be launched on the Gulf of Mexico, posing even less risk to people or objects on the ground.
The launch pad may not even be on the ground.
"We may be launching from a floating platform," Musk said in September.
Finally, Boca Chica is one of the southernmost municipalities in the United States. Getting as close as possible to the equator allows the rockets to save fuel because the Earth's rotation speeds up the launch considerably.
2019: Launch of the Big Falcon spacecraft
Gwynne Shotwell, President and Chief Operating Officer of SpaceX, said the company was hoping to test the launch of a prototype ship in "jumps" (not in orbit) of South Texas by the end of 2019.
The goal would be to gather valuable data on the prototype to refine the next version. As with many previous SpaceX test launches, it is very likely that there is a "quick and unplanned disassembly", as Musk likes to call explosive rockets.
2020-2021: Try to launch a full BFR and put a spaceship into orbit
At the Satellite 2018 conference in March, Shotwell said the BFR should be "orbital by 2020," implying that a booster and spacecraft will be built, shipped to Texas, integrated and launched. here there.
However, Musk said in September that no decision had yet been taken on a schedule. He added that he wanted to make several launches of orbital tests unscrewed before hiring people.
2022: Launch of two missions to Mars full of cargo and supplies (but no one)
Musk said his "ambitious" schedule was 2022 when the first Big Falcon spaceship missions were launched on Mars.
Each ship would fly first into orbit around the Earth, which would use the bulk of its fuel. Then several other oil spaceships would launch to fill the vehicle with enough fuel to reach Mars. The number of flights and the duration of this operation are not known.
Mars and Earth come together about once every two years, creating windows of time when it is faster to reach the planet. For this reason, the best months for the launch would be summer 2022.
Depending on how fast the Big Falcon spacecraft can accelerate – its "delta-v" – it could take anywhere from a few months to almost a year to reach Mars. Thus, a landing in late 2022 or early 2023 is likely.
2022-2023: Launch the first Big Falcon spacecraft on Mars
Musk wants the first spacecraft to be full of cargo and machinery that future missions will need. This material would be needed to enable humans to build facilities capable of generating electricity, collecting water, bottling Martian air and transforming these raw resources into methane. and oxygen for launches back to Earth.
Paul Wooster, SpaceX's lead development engineer for Mars, gave further details about this in August. Wooster said the first two unprepared cargo missions would "confirm the water resources of the places you are interested in and then determine [landing] risks for future missions, then start to set up some of the infrastructure you will need ', such as landing areas for a more secure arrival of crewed missions.
2023: Launch the first people with BFR and send them around the moon
In September, Musk introduced the world to SpaceX's first hope for space tourism: Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire. Maezawa pays SpaceX an undisclosed amount (probably hundreds of millions of dollars) to be the first passenger on board the WCR.
Maezawa has purchased all the seats in the vehicle's spacecraft and plans to select six to eight artists from different disciplines to make the one-week trip around the moon in 2023.
This mission would be the ultimate proof of the smooth functioning of the WCR.
"He is paying a lot of money to help with the ship and its recall," Musk said in September. "In the end, it pays for the average citizen to visit other planets."
2024: Explode people during the first human journey on Mars
Assuming that the first cargo, refueling and screening missions are going well, SpaceX would then send one or two crews to Mars.
Wooster said each ship will carry "at least" 100 tons of supplies. By carrying far more supplies than any crew needed for a multi-year mission on Mars, as well as bulky equipment, SpaceX could bypass the need for advanced (and yet non-existent) technologies that would otherwise be needed to stay on Mars .
2025: Boots on Mars
As with the first unprepared Mars missions, it may take six to nine months for crew ships to reach the red planet.
These first ships are likely to serve as homes for astronauts, Wooster said in August. It would not be the most comfortable configuration, but it could reduce the complexity of the mission by eliminating the need to immediately create habitats on Mars.
2028: Completion of the construction of the base Mars Apha
When someone asked Musk on Twitter how long it would take to build the first permanent Martian base – what he called "Alpha Base Mars" – Musk m said "Probably 2028."
From that point on, Musk said in March that a colony could begin to form.
"It will start by building the most basic infrastructure, just a base for creating a propellant, a power plant, explosive domes in which to cultivate crops – all of which are fundamentals without which it is impossible to survive", he said. -he declares. "And then really, there will be an explosion of entrepreneurial opportunities."
Perhaps the 2030s: construction of the first city on Mars
This calendar has been speculative since the beginning, but at this point the milestones are starting to get closer to fantasy.
Many life science experts doubt that the necessary technologies are ready for people to land on Mars and survive in the 2020s – let alone build a permanent settlement city soon after.
Yet this is precisely what Musk wants to do: build a safeguard for humanity on the red planet.
"I hope people will start to see a real goal that we should aspire to, to establish a civilization on Mars," Musk said in 2017. "It's not just about l? humanity, but of all the life we hold dear. "
Musk plans to send about a million people to Mars, for around $ 200,000 a single way. He thinks the price will be possible given the possibility of reusing the WCR.
Musk does not think that life on Mars should be sweet either.
"Mars will need everything from iron foundries to pizza joints," he said. "I think Mars should really have some great bars: the Mars Bar."
From the 2100s: Terraform Mars into a planet similar to Earth
In each of its job offers, SpaceX claims that it pursues the "ultimate goal of enabling human life on Mars."
To this end, his website hosts the image of a rusty red planet turning into a world similar to the Earth. The illustration is a nod to a hypothetical and speculative process called terraforming.
Terraforming is a type of climate change, but deliberate and faster than the current process on Earth.
The idea is that Mars could be transformed into a hot, humid world, better suited to permanent human colonization, if we could melt the planet's carbon dioxide-rich icecaps.
In its current state, Mars has less than 1% of the atmospheric density at its surface relative to the Earth. (Billions of years ago, most of Mars' air was blown into space.) This makes it comparable to a vacuum chamber. Under these conditions, harmful radiation in space is not blocked and people can not breathe outside a space suit or sealed colony.
It is not known if terraforming could be done sustainably on Mars. NASA doubts that this is possible, as there may not be enough gas trapped in the poles to feed a pleasant planetary atmosphere.
In addition, the effort may require a kind of powerful satellite that can generate a magnetic shield to protect against solar radiation that would otherwise project any man-made atmosphere.
On the other hand, the scenarios studied by the researchers do not really take into account water or methane (a potent greenhouse gas) likely to be trapped in Martian soil. They also do not study whether comets and chemical-rich asteroids could be redirected to hit Mars. Musk even said that neutralizing Mars could help.
Experimenting with terraforming may only be a way to say if it is possible. Musk, or perhaps its memory and heritage, may well be the momentum that makes it possible in the distant future.
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