Building the first city on Mars will need 1,000 spacecraft, done in 20 years

Recently, SpaceX CEO shared a few more information about the plan as well as the necessary means not only to go to Mars but also to build a stable base that can operate as a real city. up there.

That's the long-term vision that Musk and his aerospace technology company set: turning humans into an interplanetary species. The plan that Musk mentioned yesterday, when responding to fans on Twitter, sounds extremely impressive, or extremely ambitious, depending on your perspective.

When talking about the comments he made earlier this week at the US Air Force event in California, Musk said that the cost of launching the Starship spacecraft at about $ 2 million per trip that he mentioned was a prerequisite for realization. The ultimate goal is now: establish a self-sustaining city on Mars. He added that, to make that city a reality, Space X would need to produce and put into use about 1,000 spacecraft - those used to transport goods, infrastructure, and astronauts. mission to Mars over the course of about 20 years , because the arrangement of the planets in the solar system only allows us to make a feasible flight to Mars every two years only.

Musk also mentioned the short-term potential of the Starship spacecraft, including the load capacity of a ship in an orbit on Earth. Starship is designed to maximize reuse, and according to Musk, if all goes well, it can fly up to three times a day. Thus, each Starship can make up to 1,000 flights per year, that is, if SpaceX has as many Starship as the number of Falcon missiles they have produced (about 100), and each aircraft can transport up to 100 tons to orbit, every year, SpaceX can take orbit up to 10 million tons of goods!

SpaceX's Starship.

Musk points out that if all of the current cargo-capable spacecraft are currently in service, the total cargo load could be only 500 tons per year - of which, the Falcon's number of Falcon missiles SpaceX is almost half already.

500 tons is a lot - in fact, it's probably more than demand in any short period of time to come. But in Musk's vision of a future, the orbit will be a fairly crowded and busy area, and a transit point for transporting goods, fueling spacecraft to the Moon and stars. Fire.

Of course, to establish a stable city on Mars, we first have to get people up there. Until then, there is one more step that humanity needs to take: bring astronauts back to the Moon. NASA has set a goal of accomplishing that mission by 2024, and SpaceX says it hopes to get the Starship up there as early as 2022 to help prepare for NASA's landing. Musk has previously said that the mission to send people to Mars will take place as early as 2024, but that goal seems a bit too ambitious (like most of Musk's space plans) in terms of what conditions we have today.