EALING: Elon Musk has made no secret of his dreams to colonise Mars. But now he’s opened up about the practicalities and challenges of creating a human outpost on the Red Planet. Elon Musk seems to enjoy many things, including making grand plans for big projects. Another is announcing that he plans to make announcements. This time, the “pre-announcement” is that he and his private spaceflight company, SpaceX, are planning to release details later this year on how they plan to send humans to Mars.
On Tuesday, Musk engaged in an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit during which he answered questions about, well, anything. Some of the questions were related to SpaceX and reaching Mars. Musk intimated that details of a Mars transport system under development at SpaceX are forthcoming “towards the end of the year.”
“Good thing we didn’t do it sooner, as we have learned a huge amount from Falcon and Dragon,” said Musk. SpaceX uses the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon space capsule for re-supply missions to the International Space Station (ISS). A mission to the ISS set to launch on the same day as the Reddit conversation was halted when trouble was detected just prior to the countdown.
The postponed mission was set to be a first because SpaceX was planning to land the rocket on a floating ocean platform in an effort to further the effort to lower costs for spaceflight by recovering and reusing launch vehicles. Musk originally said that they had a 50-50 chance of pulling it off, but he later admitted that it was nothing more than a guess. “I pretty much made that up. I have no idea :),” Musk wrote.
Among some of the questions asked on Reddit were those relating to SpaceX’s rocketry. Redditors asked whether the company was considering space elevators or rockets similar to what the European Space Agency has been exploring.
“If you want to get to orbit or beyond, go with pure rockets. It is not like Von Braun and Korolev didn’t know about airplanes and they were really smart dudes,” Musk replied.
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