Tag: Mars Colonial Transporter

Categories
GeekWire

Elon Musk tweets sneak peeks at Mars plan

SpaceX Raptor engine test
SpaceX’s Raptor rocket engine undergoes its first test firing. (Credit: Elon Musk via Twitter)

GUADALAJARA, Mexico – In advance of this week’s big reveal, SpaceX’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, is dropping hints about the scale of his plans to send colonists to Mars.

Musk is scheduled to talk about what used to be known as the Mars Colonial Transporter in Guadalajara on Sept. 27 at the International Astronautical Congress.

The “late-breaking news” begins at 11:30 a.m. PT (1:30 p.m. CT) Sept. 27. Streaming video of the talk should be available via SpaceX and YouTube as well as via the IAC and Livestream.

Musk has been building up to this presentation for months, arguably for more than a year. It’s the highlight of this year’s annual conference. Although he’s been coy about the details, Musk has let some hints slip out – for example, that the rocket should be capable of sending 100 tons of payload to Mars, or 100 passengers.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Carbon fiber report sparks SpaceX speculation

Image: Falcon Heavy launch
An artist’s conception shows a Falcon Heavy rocket lifting off for Mars. (Credit: SpaceX)

Is SpaceX planning to buy billions of dollars’ worth of carbon fiber for future Mars-bound spaceships? The answer’s up in the air, but a report to that effect from Japan’s Nikkei Asian Review has set SpaceX’s fans abuzz.

The report claims that SpaceX and Toray Industries, a Japan-based fiber manufacturer, are working on a multiyear deal that could eventually be worth $2 billion to $3 billion (200 billion to 300 billion yen). “The two sides are aiming to finalize the agreement this fall after hammering out prices, time frames and other terms,” Nikkei Asian Review’s Yuichiro Kanematsu reported.

No sources were cited in the report, and SpaceX downplayed any suggestion that a deal had been reached.

“Toray is one of a number of suppliers we work with to meet our carbon fiber needs for Falcon rocket and Dragon spacecraft production, and we haven’t announced any new agreements at this time,” SpaceX spokesman Phil Larson told GeekWire in a text. “As our business continues to grow, the amount of carbon fiber we use may continue to grow.”

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Elon Musk teases SpaceX plan to colonize Mars

Image: Mars Colonial Transporter
An animation shows a lander separating from the rest of the Mars Colonial Transporter. Later concepts suggest that the entire MCT would land as a unit. (Credit: Michel Lamontagne / ESA via YouTube)

SpaceX’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, is providing increasingly detailed previews of his plan to send colonists to Mars starting in 2024, more than a decade in advance of NASA’s Red Planet timetable. But there’s one part of the plan that’s not yet clear: how to bring people back.

“It’s dangerous and probably people will die – and they’ll know that,” Musk told The Washington Post this week. “And then they’ll pave the way, and ultimately it will be very safe to go to Mars, and it will be very comfortable. But that will be many years in the future.”

The journey starts getting real in September, when Musk is due to lay out his detailed Mars colonization plan at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico. “This is going to be mind-blowing,” he said. “Mind-blowing. It’s going to be really great.” (Careful, Elon … you’re starting to sound a little Trumpish there.)

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Elon Musk’s Mars plan sparks a nerd fight

Image: Musk in Dragon
SpaceX’s Elon Musk sits in a Crew Dragon capsule during its unveiling in 2014. (Credit: SpaceX)

Is SpaceX founder Elon Musk crazy to press ahead with plans to send people to Mars? Or crazy like a fox? A rehash of discouraging words from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has sparked a renewed debate over Musk’s grand plan.

Tyson’s pronouncements actually date back to last November, when he told The Verge in an interview that people were deluding themselves if they thought private enterprise alone could send people to Mars.

“The delusion is thinking that SpaceX is going to lead the space frontier,” Tyson said. “That’s just not going to happen.”

He explained that interplanetary spaceflight is just too expensive and risky, with too little of an initial return on investment, to make sense as a private venture. “A government has a much longer horizon over which it can make investments,” Tyson said. (He told Larry King pretty much the same thing months earlier.)

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Elon Musk turns the talk from Trump to Mars

Image: Elon Musk and Barack Obama
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shows President Barack Obama around the company’s Cape Canaveral rocket processing site in 2010. (Credit: Bill Ingalls / NASA)

SpaceX’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, has had to bat down all sorts of reports about political associations over the past couple of weeks – and the strategy that seems to work the best is to get people talking about sending humans to Mars. Maybe including the politicians.

The political angle cropped up in February when the Center for Responsive Politics listed SpaceX as one of the donors to GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump. It turned out that the listing was an error, later corrected, but Musk found himself having to deny the Trump contributions via Twitter.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Elon Musk wants to go into space by 2021

Image: Elon Musk
Elon Musk flashes a smile during the StartmeupHK Festival. (Credit: InvestHK via YouTube)

SpaceX founder Elon Musk says he has his heart set on going into space himself, perhaps in the next four or five years, and organize the first flights to Mars by 2025.

Musk’s travel timetable came out this week during Musk’s chat at the StartmeupHK Festival in Hong Kong. The 44-year-old billionaire said he’d unveil his detailed plan for sending settlers to Mars in September at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico. That means the SpaceX fans who have been buzzing about the Mars Colonial Transporter may have to just keep buzzing for another eight months or so.

The StartmeupHK talk was as wide-ranging as Musk’s interests, which take in electric cars (as Tesla Motors’ CEO), solar power (as Solar City’s chairman) and the potentialuses and misuses of artificial intelligence (as a backer of the OpenAI foundation). That’s all in addition to his focus on spaceflight and humanity’s interplanetary future.

Musk introduced yet another theme: the prospects for creating brain-computer interfaces that would let you store and retrieve images and other information directly from implants in your head.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

How will Elon Musk get colonists to Mars?

Image: Mars Colonial Transporter
An animation shows a lander separating from the rest of the Mars Colonial Transporter. Later concepts suggest that the entire MCT would land as a unit. (Credit: Michel Lamontagne / ESA via YouTube)

In the wake of SpaceX’s successful rocket landing, some of the company’s most ardent fans are guessing at the shape of the biggest thing to come: the Mars Colonial Transporter.

The MCT is a crucial piece in SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s grand plan to send tens of thousands of colonists to the Red Planet, potentially starting in the next decade or two. Such a venture would mark a giant leap toward establishing a second cosmic home for humanity. Musk believes that’s a must if we’re to guard against extinction due to pandemics, asteroid strikes or other planet-wide catastrophes.

Early this year, Musk promised to unveil his architecture for Mars colonization by the end of 2015 – but in a recent GQ interview, he said the big reveal was more likely to come in early 2016. “Before we announce it, I want to make sure that we’re not gonna make really big changes to it,” he said.

Despite Musk’s reticence, space geeks have been chewing over the elements of a potential plan for years, based on the hints that have been dropped to date.

Get the full story on GeekWire.